Wintersun

Wintersun (English for winter sun) is a Finnish melodic death metal band to the singer and guitarist Jari Mäenpää.

Band History

In 2004, Jari Mäenpää separated from his previous band Ensiferum. In the same year he produced alone the demo Winter Madness and later with drummer Kai Hahto of Rotten Sound 's debut album Wintersun. Mäenpäa wrote the published pieces between 1995 and 2003. Wintersun appeared on 13 September 2004 by the label Nuclear Blast. The Japanese edition also contained all three pieces of the demo as bonus tracks. For the single " Beyond the Dark Sun" video was filmed.

In order to be able to perform live, Mäenpää committed later Jukka Koskinen as bassist and second guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari as. He takes over at live performances both the guitar part as well as the vocals. In 2006, moreover, decided Kai Hahto to get off at Rotten Sound, in order to fully concentrate on Wintersun. In September 2006, the Wintersun Tour Edition was released with live DVD from Summer Breeze 2005.

In May 2006, Jari Mäenpää began working on the second studio album Time. Originally scheduled for November 2006, the release date postponed several times. Meanwhile, it was decided instead of about 80 minutes long album, each 40 minutes long albums Time I and Time II to publish. The second studio album Time I appeared on October 19, 2012 on Nuclear Blast. Time II will follow about a year later.

Style

Music

The band's style is hard to categorize, but can be described as melodic or epic. It includes elements of different metal Substile, such as Black, Death, Power and Viking Metal with appropriate folk influences. In addition, a phonetic similarity to Jari Mäenpääs previous band Ensiferum is present, but in contrast to this, the shares of the folk are not the focus.

The songs often have more complex structure than the typical verse -chorus- scheme. An example of this is the title "Star Child" from the debut album, which can be divided into several parts, both musically and lyrically. The song is characterized by both the typical Black Metal Screaming, as well as through clear, anthemic vocals and high falsetto vocals, as in the power metal. In addition, are often unusual guitar riffs and solos, and complex percussion passages to find.

Text and Cover

For the texts of the debut album Mäenpää said in an interview:

" Lyrically it's quite a personal record, but there's a little bit of fantasy so. Actually, you can understand the songs by many ways and meanings, Which is great. But underneath all the metaphors to stars, space, vast and cold winter landscapes, it's all about my personal life - my feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams, visions and hallucinations. "

" Seen Lyrically it's a very personal album, albeit with a little imagination. In fact, you can understand the texts in many different ways, which is great. But besides all the metaphors of stars, space, wide, cold winter landscapes, it is also about my personal life -. My feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams, visions and hallucinations "

In the texts of Wintersun the thought is often questioned by death, Mäenpää brings this. Often in conjunction with stars

The cover for the debut album was designed by Kristian Wåhlin. The man lying in the snow, will show the death and hopelessness. The light between the trees to represent home, destination and birth / healing.

Reception

Ed Rivadavia from All Music Guide praises the compositions on the debut album - despite occasional predictability - in their musical diversity and recommends the album followers of extreme and yet accessible metal. Frode Stenberg of Metal Observer stands out especially the technical skills of the musicians involved in an album that Increase from song to song, and him, who had viewed the genre treated as exhaustive, have convinced them otherwise. Michael Popke Sea of Tranquility provides the musicians with respect to the mastery of their instruments and composition skills along all raised doubts; but can not convince him the kind of singing by Jari Mäenpää, this would not be consistent with the rest

Discography

  • 2004: Winter Madness Demo
  • 2004: Wintersun
  • 2006: Wintersun Tour Edition (incl. DVD)
  • 2012: Time I
Wintersun (Album) Electric guitar Bass guitar Folk music
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