Wintersun - Time II (2024)

Country: Finland
Style: Epic Symphonic Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
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This album is called Time II and time turns out, rather ironically, to be clearly the most important word to apply to it. That's partly to do with the music on it. The intro, Fields of Snow, is very much an intro but it's a substantial one, reaching the four minute mark, even though it's synth-driven Asian folk music. At the other end of the album, the metal on the closing song, Silver Leaves, ends ten minutes in, drifting into the same sort of folky music for a minute or so before becoming just ambience, chimes blowing gently in the wind and snow for another two minutes and change. It's a zenlike approach to wrapping up an album, letting us feel its theme without music getting in the way. We sit back and just exist for that time.

Some listeners will no doubt see all that as too much, Jari Mäenpää getting indulgent like this is his Tales from the Topographic Oceans, where time doesn't matter any more, just his artistry. He plays into the other reason that time is important here too, namely that he used unfathomable amounts of it to get this album to the point of release. This actually outdoes Chinese Democracy on that front, which is patently ridiculous, given that Time II serves as the second half of Time an insane distance from the first half. So, let's dive into that, even though I wasn't aware of any of it during that, well, time.

As far as I can tell, Wintersun recorded the bulk of Time in 2006 as a double album, having already written the songs for both halves, and the rest was in the can within twelve months. However, the release continued to be delayed, with some of Mäenpää's explanations making sense but others not so much. Eventually, the first half of the album saw release in 2012 as Time I, six years on, and mixing of the second half began shortly afterwards. However, after raising half a million euros in crowdfunding, it still took him a dozen more years to actually release the second half as Time II, a third and later album, The Forest Seasons, being released in between in 2017.

There are fans who are leaving 0% ratings for Time II, not on the basis of the music, however they choose to justify it, but because of how they felt Mäenpää treated them. I'm not going to do that and wouldn't even had I been along for that ride, but, even coming in fresh here, I have to ask one important question. However good or bad this album is, does it justify eighteen years of work and I have to say that it doesn't, even though I enjoyed it immensely. This is a really good album and I will happily seek out the first half to see how it plays alongside it. However, is it eighteen years in the making good? No, it isn't.

But back to the music. The first obvious note to make is that it's not a concept album, as far as I'm aware, but it clearly follows a classical Asian theme. The intro plays into the beautiful imagery on the cover, of a cherry tree in such a Japanese pose that I ought to call it sakura. It sounds just like a piece of classical folk music, played on traditional instruments like kotos, pipas and shamisens, but not so much that I would believe that's the case. It all sounds like synths to me, as pleasant as they are and as majestically as they build.

That Japanese theme continues thorughout the four songs proper, all of them highly substantial and three of them over ten minutes in length. All of them feature Japanese melodies at points in and amongst the metal, playing into their epic nature. Sometimes, those melodies even reach the vocals and the guitarwork, rather than being reserved for drops out of the intensity of the metal into calmer folk sections. The Way of the Fire drops twice for contrast, once during the midsection for some tasty guitarwork, and again later in the song, with those faux Japanese instruments set against a choral backdrop. The interlude between One with the Shadows and Storm features the guitar ably impersonating a pipa, or maybe a biwa if it's meant to be exclusively Japanese.

I liked The Way of the Fire immediately. Not unusually for Wintersun, it sets up quietly and folkily, then launches into high gear just like that. Frantic drums build a wall of sound with orchestration over the top, though the guitar struggling to emerge but not quite making it. Harsh vocals turn into clean vocals, with the latter used more across the album as a whole, and the chorus is tasty. I always see Wintersun listed as symphonic death metal and that's never rang true to me. This isn't death metal to me at all, more like epic metal. It sprawls majestically with that symphonic flavour.

The guitar solos on One with the Shadows are even more neoclassical than on its predecessor and that remains a common element throughout too. As much as I like those two songs, though, what leapt out to me was the craftsmanship on Storm. As I understand it, this is the only piece here that doesn't have an equivalent on Time I but it's my favourite piece. The ambience of storm samples in earlier songs is more overt still here, as if that storm is building. There's a very cool moment soon into the second half when everything drops away, as if we've entered the eye, and, of course, it all ends with storm samples and that elegant Japanese folk flavour, moving into Silver Leaves, which is the album's closer.

I enjoyed this a huge amount. I relish in the instrumental parts here, the calmer ones as much as the frantic ones, especially how the Asian, very possibly purely Japanese, flavour is woven closely into the metal. If I had to describe it, it's symphonic epic folk metal, which is unwieldy but fairer in my eyes than death metal ever was. I like that two songs get frantic, moving capably into extreme metal, but two remain more sedate, still metal but without that extreme prefix. I even like how it plays with time, down to that zenlike ending, though I can certainly see why many wouldn't.

And so this is an easy 8/10 for me. I've listened through a few times and it feels as strong as ever it was on the first time through. I'll happily seek out Time I to compare. I see that fans seem split on which half is the better, but only those enraged by Mäenpää's antics over the past eighteen years are avoiding the suggestion that they go well together. Maybe time—there it is again—will blend the two closer together, rather than seem, as they do today, to be anchored in different eras.