Album Review: Amorphis - Borderland

I've said this before, but it's worth repeating; things can be too perfect. When you think about it, if something is perfect, it sucks the optimism out of the air. If things can't get any better, why would we ever need more of that thing? Logically, you wouldn't, and I find this phenomenon appearing more often these days with music. As productions continue to get slicker and slicker, we've reached a point where some bands have a sound so pristine that it actually sucks the life out of their music.

That isn't to say metal needs to sound like it was recorded on a potato, as the old joke about black metal goes, but there is something about a bit of roughness that is necessary for our eyes to focus on the core, and not the glossy sheen meant to trick us from seeing the hollow emptiness.

Amorphis is not hollow by any means, but as I have listened to and/or reviewed their last three or four albums, each one comes to us with a sound even more immaculate than the last. They are metal done to absolute perfection, which is what makes it interesting how little I have returned to those albums in the time since each has been released. Everything tells me Amorphis is among the very best to do what they do, but there is an almost eerie lack of humanity to their recordings that makes them easy to slide out of my train of thought.

This album follow in exactly that path, blending melancholy and melody with aplomb, giving us beautiful clean choruses punctuated by absolutely guttural moments of death metal fury. This is an even slicker version of when Opeth was at their best, and in many ways is done better than Opeth could have ever imagined. Tomi Jousten's vocals are gorgeous, but as is the case with the production, perhaps too clean for their own good. The choruses are beautiful, but they don't have the soul or gravitas of a rougher-hewn singer. He is, in a way, too good.

The songs deliver exactly as they should. The opening trio of songs hit hard, give us big hooks, and if anything dial down on the melancholy a bit to make this an 'upbeat' album by Amorphis standards. Releasing in the summer rather than the fall might have been an indication that the band was trying to look more on the bright side, which certainly sounds to be the case.

With that being said, if you ask me to differentiate this album from "Under The Red Cloud", which floored me the first time I heard it, I'm not sure I could do so without having to break down statistics about the percentages of clean and harsh vocals, and soon and so forth. Amorphis is doing what Amorphis always does, and they're damn good at it. I'll never discount the ability to write great metal songs, which Amorphis does each and every time.

I can only say that as good as Amorphis is, their music does not tend to stick with me long after the albums come and go. Perhaps it's the shimmering perfection of the recording, or perhaps it's the lyrical focus on stories of nature rather than human emotion, but there is a disconnect between what Amorphis delivers and what I'm looking for out of new favorites.

All of that is to say I would certainly recommend "Borderland" to any metal fan who is looking for something new that is of hte highest quality, but I can't guarantee I will find myself loving the record at the end of the year as much as most people will. I'm in a weird place, and clinically impressive metal isn't the medicine I need. That doesn't take away from how impressive Amorphis is, especially this deep into their career. They deserve all the praise they'll get.