The latest vinyl edition of this iconic Finnish death metal album from Relapse, presented on a new color vinyl variant, with the standard original ten-song track list from the original.

Another prog-death essential that I am finally getting into the C-Blast shop, Tales From The Thousand Lakes is the classic 1994 album from Finnish death metallers Amorphis. This is their second album, right on the cusp of their evolution into the folk-flecked, prog-rock influenced sound that would fully burst forth with their next long-player, 1996's Elegy. I love this era of Amorphis, this youthful gang of crushing doom-death heavies exploring their Finnish cultural roots and mythology by ambitiously putting together a concept album that is centered around the epic 19th-century poem "Kalevala", written by Elias Lönnrot; a kind of creation myth, "Kalevala" is one of the most important pieces of literature in Finnish history, a vast and mythic saga that became widely known outside of Lönnrot's home country and which has been cited as a direct influence on J. R. R. Tolkien's world-building for "Middle-Earth". Pretty fertile soil for the imaginative Amorphis, who wove the elements of the "official" national epic into this sprawling, majestic death metal opus. When Lakes came out, there really wasn't anything quite like it - this is before the "folk metal" aesthetic was even a thing, and the inclusion of goth-rock elements really set this stuff apart as well. Ticks off so many boxes for me, it's become one of my all-time favorite Finnish metal albums. And there's, uh, a special relationship that I have with the song "Black Winter Day" that always keeps it hummin' in the back of my head.

The band instantly transports me into the beautiful shadowed nightscape of the album art, as "Thousand Lakes" unfurls a stately, mesmeric piano piece with faint rattling percussion in the background and etheric vocals (from Ville Tuomi) drifting through this striking, atmosphere-drenched introduction. The mid-paced death metal chug then kicks in with "Into Hiding", and the album burts with some seriously heavy doom-tinged death rumbling with Tomi Koivusaari's intense vocals. Koivusaari and lead guitarist Esa Holopainen weave twin guitar harmonies, the sound awash in background Moog keyboards and piano (lush, but very tastefully placed beneath the mix), while wicked guttural roars join with clear, tremulous male singing, all emerging with this patina of Finnish folkiness informing parts of the melodies and vocal arrangements. It's majestic stuff. It's also incorporating the subtle progressive rock influences that would be more prominent on later Amorphis releases. There is a churning complexity on songs like "The Castaway", "First Doom", and "Forgotten Sunrise" that interact in interesting ways with the brutish doom-death moments and chugging mid-tempo bulldozer riffs, with interlacing minor-key harmony and layered counterpoint riffs. A few faster siongs like "Drowned Maid" and "In The Beginning" rattle you out of your spellbound state, and drop some grinding riffs; that guitar crunch is perfect. The folk-prog quality immediately sets Tales From The Thousand Lakes apart from anything else I was listening to at the time. These guys nailed a great balance of that folk and progressive rock sounds with the pummeling heaviness. And man, the organ tones on this album are luscious, with songs slowing down and slipping into languid instrumental interludes where that Hammond-like sound drifts like aural mead. Lots of Tangerine Dream-esque synthesizer sounds and feminine synth-choirs (courtesy of Kasper Mårtenson) with those traditional folk melodies melting into everything. Love that stuff. I mentioned in my review of the great Sol Ether debut how allergic I am to much of what's described as "folk metal", but when it is weird and otherworldly as what Amorphis do here, I'm all about it. And that closer "Magic And Mayhem", holy crap, it's the meanest and heaviest song on all of Lakes, murderous riffing and a riot-inducing mid-tempo groove, bursts of space-rock synth, it's wild. Perfect finale to this magnificent epic of an album, which would quickly become one of the more influential records of its kind on other bands throughout the 1990s and onward. Pretty crucial stuff for fans of forward-thinking death from that era a la Edge Of Sanity, Paradise Lost, Enslaved, and Tiamat.

Vinyl includes a double sided lyric insert.