Nightwish.

http://www.nightwish.com

Did you kinda sorta liked the image Evanescence evoked, but laugh at the obvious comercialization of Gothic imagery and pseudo-hard rock sound?  We Americans suffer greatly from a very poor music scene.  Nightwish blows them away. 

The natives of Finland have been going since 1997.  They began with an operatic Mezzo-Soprano lead singer, lending them a uniqueness uncommon to Metal bands.  The founding member and lead songwriter Tuomas Holopainen draws from many influences, chief among them Film Music (man after my own heart), Classic literature, Fantasy literature, Norse mythology (duh), and obvious God-centered themes.

While perhaps not a believer in the purest Christian sense, one can see a Bono-esque quality to his songwriting.  While not of the more genteel Irish Christian persuasion, you can find more of a rustic, blunt spirituality tempered by poetic imagery and a deep longing to find something higher.  Always poetic and sometimes obscure, they are lyrics that drive your mind to create.  Not only with the imagination, but also with research into certain elements.

Take, for instance, the song Amaranth. The chorus reads:

Caress the one, the Never-Fading
Rain in your heart
The tears of snow-white sorrow
Caress the one, the hiding Amranth
In a land of the daybreak

I googled “Amaranth.”  It is a flower that grows natively in equatorial regions of the Americas and Asia, yielding many seeds for grain, and has many purposes.  It is a life-giving plant whose flower never fades.  Now how much imagery is conveyed in one little-used but beautiful word, and how much fodder for research (and writing)!  Nearly the entire band are avid readers, and especially love The Lord of the Rings, likely for its reliance on the Norse sagas as well as its spiritual imagery.  There are also many songs that tell a story, or invoke the sense of a tale that Norse peoples of old would pass down orally.

Musically, Nightwish is a melting pot of many different elements: loud, driving guitars; a female lead that breaks into two-part harmonies; a male lead that adds that occasional guttural element, yet never harsh on the ears like “screamo”; a strong backing choir as you might hear in the scores to Van Helsing, The Mummy, or The Lord of the Rings, and orchestral arrangements that lend that epic quality; Uillean pipes and fiddles for the occasional Celtic foray; the occasional speedmetal solo with PIANO DOUBLING.  That part is especially cool!

As I’ve said before in other places, Nightwish is all at once everything that Evanescence, Jim Steinman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Metallica, Led Zeppelin and Queen WISHED they could have been, and all of them pale in comparison.  They are artistic waifs and commercial pariahs (except Queen and Zeppelin).  Nightwish does it all without commercial pretense.  Artistic pretense, maybe, but it’s all very worth it.