Album Review: Nightwish - Human:II:Nature

Nightwish has always been self-indulgent, but it's been getting worse. The music has been getting longer-winded, less metallic, and just flat-out less memorable. Tuomas is now so full of ideas of being an auteur that he has forgotten what made Nightwish so popular, apparently thinking that having a singer as capable of Floor Jansen is enough to overcome the gaping flaws in his now atrophied songwriting. It's not, and there was never any excuse for a concept album about evolution that went so far as to include spoken word sections from a biologist. It wasn't musical, it wasn't interesting, and it sounded like hell.

This new record carries on that spirit, this time featuring an eight-part epic that is a story unto itself. But before we get to that, let's address the more 'normal' side of the record. The first single, "Noise", was met with a mixed reaction, and now that we have the rest of the record, it stands out as one of the better tracks. It may not be great, but it does feel like a symphonic metal band, which can't be said about everything here. Tuomas keeps taking Nightwish further and further from metal, like on "Harvest", which is mostly folk music, and barely features Floor. I truly don't understand how a band can have a great singer in their ranks and barely feature her on a song. It's criminal stupidity from Tuomas.

The softeness isn't the problem so much as it is the lack of hooks. Song after song, the music is pretty, but there just isn't anything to sink your teeth into. It doesn't sound grand, or epic, or powerful. It sounds very much like the product of a man who was struggling to write new songs, which Tumoas admitted to. He thought he found the fountain of Nightwish inspiration, but it sounds liek snake oil from here.

And then there's the epic.....

"All The Works Of Nature Which Adorn The World" is an eight-part track that is slow to develop, and a disappointment once it gets going. This long block of time is Nightwish at their worst, as Tuomas becomes his inner film composer, giving us fragmented bits of instrumental themes that are pretty, but don't hang together as a fully realized song, and barely sound like Nightwish. Floor is absent from nearly the entire track, and asking metal fans to sit through twenty-plus minutes of orchestral noodling is insanity. This track makes clear Tuomas has no idea what his fans want from Nightwish, nor does he particularly want to be Nightwish anymore. Giving this much of an album to a composition  that doesn't even feature his band on the vast majority is an insult to them, is intolerable for us, and should be taken as the death knell for this group. It's a half-hearted effort.

What bigger insult could I throw at it?