Queen of Time Review




                                   Amorphis Queen of Time Review

             This is not a full review. I will do one of those later



      Amorphis's new album, titled "Queen of Time," is a masterpiece. I have found myself repeatedly listening to this album, the way I did with Under the Red Cloud. I still don't know my favourite song from Queen of Time, or any Amorphis album for that matter.

 The Bee

    This is a very interesting song. It starts out with keyboards then Tomi Joutsen growls and a girl starts "awing"(I don't remember the musical term for this.) We hear the guitar start to play with Tomi Joutsen roaring. The riff that plays with the verses sounds like Follow Me Into Fire, if I remember the song correctly. It talks about bees building their castles in the heads of kings (not literal kings, at least from my interpretation), a bee summoning other bees to crawl in the chosen skull, making honey, etc. My stepdad once said on Facebook, "Quite possibly the heaviest song about bees making honey. Amorphis can even make walking through flower-filled valleys brutal." My family and I are very excited for this new album and the upcoming United States tour. The last tour was pretty awesome.
I rate this song 10 out of 10. This was a good choice for a single.

Message in the Amber

      We start with a riff that was used in an interview video with Tomi Joutsen. The music gets lighter and Tomi starts singing. This part reminds me about Sinisthra, one of the other bands Tomi Joutsen sings in and that seems very underrated. We then go from light to heavy really quickly. The guitar riff kind of reminds me of an Irish song. Around the 4:15 mark, we hear a choir. Maybe I will consider asking my chorus teacher if we can play this song next year. We would have to replace the growls though, unless the teacher would let me growl for everyone. We would have to figure out how to add the robotic effect or just remove it and sing with our voices. I like the way they lined up the growls with the guitar part as well. It was amazing. I rate this song 10 out of 10 as well.  (SPOILER ALERT: All of the other songs are rated 10 out of 10, so I won't put that.

Daughter of Hate

      The beginning of this song starts with a Church organ. Then a riff that reminds me of Skálmöld starts to play. Throughout this song Tomi Joutsen talks about the daughter of hate (hense the name.) He said "Do not look at me, I am the daughter of hate. You must not see me, never touch my heart, never," making some wonder his true identity. After a while, the song pauses and we get a nice saxiphone riff followed by a lovely guitar solo, followed by our beloved writer speaking in Finnish. In the interview I mentioned in Message in the Amber, our man Tomi Joutsen reveals that Pekka Kainulainen is repeating the English lyrics.  

The Golden Elk

      I like this song a lot. It starts out with a soft instrumental then Esa Holopainen plays a familiar riff that sounds like a piano song that I can't remember the name of. When that is done, Tomi does a short growl that sounds so amazing because I haven't heard him do one of that length before. It makes me think of fighting a dragon for some reason and the dragon tries to roar but it fails (Like I did the first time I tried to type that. I typed "itmfapld" or something like that.) Throughout the song, he is talking about the Golden Elk, also known as the Queen of Time, Mother of Time, Keeper of Fleeing Moments, and Shaper of Destinies. Before he sings this, he sings something with a melody that reminds me of a song from Tuonela. They could have named this song Queen of Time if they wanted to, to fit their usual "name of the album song title" thing. I guess they did something similar with Circle, Eclipse, AM Universum, and a few other albums. We end with a beautiful piano solo that has a bit of the main melody.

Wrong Direction

      This is the second single that was released, the song that they went underground 1,000 feet to record some of the video. I like the melody in this song a lot. The ending of the song is different than the video's end in one way. It repeats the end and plays for a few more seconds.

Amongst Stars

      We start out with a beautiful guitar riff that a synthesizer copies in the repeat. Tomi sings something then Anneke van Giersbergen starts singing. She sounds like the singer who sings the English version of Christmas is Here by the Finnish Christmas band Raskasta Joulua. There are a lot of singers in that band and I was unable to find out who she is. Part of this song reminds me of Christmas is Here. At the end of the song, we get the riff from the beginning.


Bonus Tracks

      Unfortunately I couldn't get my hands on the bonus tracks. I can probably get them now that it's May 18th in some parts of the United States, but I'll save that for the next review. I heard part of both of them in the Google Play Store while I was writing this though. I like what I heard though.


      I give this album a 10 out of 10 rating. I love how everything was arranged. I will hopefully have the full review up soon. I hope Amorphis will remaster all of their old songs and maybe play Kuusamo live.

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