SILVER LAKE BY ESA HOLOPAINEN

Silver Lake by Esa Holopainen NUCLEAR BLAST

HOLOPAINEN HAS THRUST HIS MOST PROGRESSIVE INFLUENCES TO THE FORE.

Amorphis founder goes it alone. With all his mates.

Despite being a palpably progressive force for most of their three decades, Finland’s Amorphis have only recently begun to properly cross over to the prog audience their routinely great music deserves. Guitarist Esa Holopainen has been churning out magnificent songs with the band all along, contributing hugely to their folk-tinged and stridently atmospheric sound and never giving any indication that he quite fancied making a solo record.

Having taken the plunge, Holopainen has thrust his most elegant and progressive influences to the fore, harnessing the multifarious virtues of a host of guest vocalists and delivering something gently but consistently surprising, albeit always within spitting distance of Amorphis’ sonic world.

Holopainen is a fabulous guitar player, as demonstrated on the opening instrumental title track, but everything he plays here works in service of the songs and the people singing them. Katatonia’s Jonas Renkse sings both the dreamy squall of Sentiment and the bruised meander of Apprentice with his usual wistful finesse, sounding utterly at home amid his new foil’s billowing crescendos. Ray Of Light is succinct but spellbinding, with Leprous’ Einar Solberg wielding that spectacular falsetto like a wizard’s wand, oozing anguish and delivering a brilliantly hair-raising chorus that is as sharp and memorable as anything Holopainen has written.

Elsewhere, Promising Sun is a motoring, prog metal bruiser with an immaculate vocal from Soilwork and Bjorn ‘Speed’ Strid (Soilwork/The Night Flight Orchestra), and Anneke van Giersbergen sings the last remaining birds from any nearby trees on the symphonic rumble of Fading Moon.

Naturally, Amorphis frontman Tomi Joutsen pops by, lending his unwavering bellow and caustic croon to In Her Solitude’s

vivid shape-shifting.

It’s not all rock and metal cameos, however: the rousing Storm features vocalist Håkan Hemlin from Swedish folk rock duo Nordman, and his charisma leaps from the speakers, even with Holopainen’s mesmerising melodic sensibilities blazing away in the background. Likewise, Finnish actormusician Vesa-Matti Loiri brings the kind of scene-stealing presence that you might expect to Alkusointu; his sonorous narration (which is, not unreasonably, in Finnish) blending perfectly with Holopainen’s widescreen doom-prog backdrop, analogue synths and spiralling woodwind included. With friends like these, and songs this good, Holopainen should definitely not wait another 30 years to make a follow-up.