The Tavastia club in Helsinki is truly a location steeped in history. One album that also has a great history is Tales from the Thousend Lakes by Amorphis.
To celebrate the album's 30th anniversary, Amorphis have performed their classic album in its entirety in chronological order and the result will be released in July 2024 as Tales from the Thousand Lakes (Live at Tavastia).

It's been 24 years since Amorphis changed the metal world forever with their second album "Tales From The Thousand Lakes"; an epic piece of work that paved the way for one of the most successful Finnish music careers of all time. On twelve albums so far, Amorphis has brought us closer to the Finnish national epic, the "Kalevala", toured the world several times, received countless gold records and managed to achieve success after success with their unmistakable mix of metal, folklore and rock. Many winters have since passed through Finland but Amorphis is still there and is bigger & better than ever! With their fateful thirteenth studio album "Queen Of Time", produced by Jens Bogren, the band provides a ground-breaking epic about the rise and fall of civilization. The day has come - the next defining moment in an unprecedented career has arrived.

My Kantele is a follow-up to Amorphis' excellent Elegy. Elegy was an album that worked as a culmination point between death metal and progressive metal, and opened all doors in the rock world for Amorphis. My Kantele doesn't contain anything very new and special; actually, it seems that all four previously unreleased tracks are just leftovers from Elegy. That isn't a bad thing at all - the new songs work well enough and of course these kinds of packages are gold for fans. The most interesting songs on the EP are the covers, Hawkwind's "Levitation" and Kingston Wall's "And I Hear You Call." Amorphis covered "Levitation" very, very well - but unfortunately they copied Kingston Wall's arrangement of the excellent "And I Hear You Call," so it doesn't offer a lot.

To say that the past decade has been kind to Amorphis would be an understatement. From the elegance of Silent Waters to the pomp of Circle, the Finnish prog metallers have carved a solid foothold for themselves over the course of eight years. So, of course, when a new album is released, the inevitable question of whether or not the flavor has gone bland comes up. Sure enough, Under the Red Cloud proves to be another worthy addition to Amorphis’s discography, as well as one of the best progressive metal releases this year so far.

Bolder than The Karelian Isthmus and conceptually superior to later attempts at progressive but radio-friendly '90s metal, Tales From the Thousand Lakes might just be Amorphis' best recording. This record is heavy, yet never succumbs to the inane extremes common to the melodic death metal genre. The guitars and drums are in ample supply, and a rare attention to arrangement and production really sets this disc apart. The guttural vocal work isn't for every metal fan, but the neo-prog instrumental work and overall heaviness should impress those turned off by the throaty rants. In a possible attempt to widen the band's appeal, Tomi Koivusaari briefly sings, which doesn't exactly work out. These moments of confusion are short-lived, though, and they hardly blemish the release. The subtle addition of keyboards is a nice touch - Amorphis' captivation with the instrument would soften later efforts…

In melodic death metal and symphonic black metal, the contrast between extreme and non-extreme elements is a lot like the contrast between what jazz musicians call "inside" and "outside" playing. Some avant-garde jazz favors an inside/outside approach; some avant-garde jazz favors outside playing from start to finish - and similarly, whether a melodic death metal or symphonic black metal album makes greater use of extreme elements or greater use of non-extreme elements depends on the artist. Skyforger, it turns out, is a melodic death metal album that keeps the extreme elements to a bare minimum and is greatly influenced by progressive metal and power metal as well as folk metal. This late 2008/early 2009 recording isn't just slightly melodic - it is very melodic - and while Skyforger rocks aggressively much of the time, it is never flat-out vicious…

After forcing their eclectic but often scattered sonic experiments to extremes of self-indulgence on albums like Tuonela and Am Universum (both of which still offered the odd great song, mind you), Finnish heavy metal godfathers Amorphis found their way back to songwriting consistency and economy on 2004's acclaimed Far from the Sun. A surprisingly focused amalgam of past and present, that album marked a measured return to Amorphis' heavy metal roots after years of apparent disownment, and set the stage for yet another compelling LP in 2006's even more unapologetically metallic Eclipse. Not that either one of the records could be called a death metal slugfest, nor a complete abandonment of those not-always-stellar but still necessary forays into other progressive musical realms, but rather mature and well-balanced statements, acknowledging the style that made the band famous in the first place…

After 1999s rock-based album Tuonela, it was unclear what direction Amorphis would take with future releases. Instead of radically changing musical styles, like they had done in the past, the band seemed to have found steady ground in which they felt comfortable. Am Universum preserves the moody atmosphere of Tuonela, but explores wider dynamics, and an overall more varying sound.

To stand out in a field where the obvious signifiers are the most common, and therefore the most clichéd, elements, one has to know when to try something different. Amorphis had already shown itself to be a more than competent end-of-the-century Scandinavian black metal outfit, but there were plenty of others equally able to say the same. The inspired turning point had two points of origin - recruiting another lead vocalist, Pasi Koskinen, to sing with Tomi Koivusaari, and deciding to record an album infused with earlier Finnish folk influences, both musically and lyrically. The choice of lyrical inspiration, Finland's national epic The Kalevala, isn't necessarily surprising given how often metal of all kinds has favored tales of dungeons and grue…

Amorphis at this point were embracing their roots in melodic death and progressive metal, still hanging on the folk metal influence they had on the last few albums from Eclipse to Skyforger. Clearly, the band still decides to mix up their style here and there, but stay true to the desired result. Putting out classic after classic, the band had already covered multiple stories featured in the Kalevala with the help of Pekka Kainulainen's writing by now. And they had repeatedly done this to great success, fleshing out so many different styles of music masterfully.
Amorphis as a whole is very consistent at providing wonderful albums that all give a fresh new story or impression, and thus old and new fans can all find something interesting to evaluate about them.

Who says you can't ever find your way home again? Finland's Amorphis started testing the veracity of that age-old maxim in 2005, when their Eclipse album interrupted years of ruthless genre-hopping evolution, took stock of a bevy of styles from all eras of the group's long career, and stewed them into a single, mostly satisfying mélange. Amorphis' peacemaking experiment with their past also coincided with the introduction of new vocalist Tomi Joutsen, leading some to speculate that the departed Pasi Koskinen had much to do with their prior direction, and perhaps proving the point when their subsequent outing, 2007's Silent Waters, found the band pursuing the all-inclusive philosophy once again…

Tuonela proves the fact that Amorphis are not one of the bands that can be chained to a particular genre or style. Such bands are great because you always wonder with what they'll come up next. You can't say that Amorphis is that or is this, only that in the period xx-yy they were singing in a way and then in another way and so on. They stay true to their name (since Amorphis comes from a word that means "no determinate form or shape"). Their creation is always surprising and even though this may cause a "recycle" of their fans from period to period, it doesn't lessen their artistic merits. This album finds Amorphis experimenting with many more sounds and instruments and the good production sure helps to show it. Yes, it sure is a departure from the style of Elegy, but not for the worse…

On Halo, their staggering fourteenth studio effort, the Fins underline their trailblazing status as one of the most original, culturally relevant and rewarding acts ever to emerge from the land of the thousand lakes. In the past, mythology and legend took the role of today’s pop culture: Stories and a set of values uniting us by giving us a voice and a tapestry on which we can find each other and identify with something.

Thirty-one years after their inception, with uncounted global tours under their belt and fourteen albums deep in their career, AMORPHIS still proves to be the musical fountain of youth, an extraordinary band constantly reinventing itself without abandoning its mystical roots. With “Halo”, they deliver an astonishing album that deserves to be played everywhere, transcending the realms of metal and rock by its sheer profoundness and musicality.