...Wait, WHAT?! Didn't this album come out 15 years ago? Heck, "Kingdom For A Heart" wasn't even a single for the original release! Have I missed something?
...Oh, wait, this is from that re-recorded version of Ecliptica that Sonata Arctica mentioned they'd be releasing late this year! Oh joy, another crappy re-recording by a band that I really like...
...OK, time to be serious.
Sonata Arctica are a band who I have a odd relationship with. On the one hand, I have every single one of their albums (with the exception of Pariah's Child from earlier this year...and that's only because I've kept forgetting to pick it up! I might try and do that tomorrow, now I think on it, as I'm planning on going to a gig in Newcastle and can always pop up a bit early to do that...) and there are quite a few songs by them which I would call stone cold (pun not intended) classics of the power metal genre. On the other hand, with the exception of Ecliptica, I find the band a bit too inconsistent with their songwriting to really impress me enough to want to become one of their fans. I'm not saying that I'm one of those people who loves the band for their first four albums (Ecliptica, Silence, Winterheart's Guild and Reckoning Night) and hates their other four albums (Unia, The Days Of Grays, Stones Grow Her Name and Pariah's Child): I like songs across their whole discography, but, for some reason, I don't really think they've managed to put out an album (again, apart from Ecliptica) which I'd have said was a strong album. Maybe it's because I know Ecliptica so much better than the rest of Sonata's discography (Ecliptica was one of the first power metal albums I ever listened to), but I just feel that the band, while still very good, have never successfully managed to capture something for a whole album that they had nailed down perfectly on their debut.
So this re-recording is something that I looked to with a HUGE amount of concern when I heard about it. I even started working on an article where I tried to break down exactly why I was concerned about this, but I had to stop because I just felt that it was all boiling down to the same points: I was concerned Tony's voice isn't going to handle doing the album any more, I failed to see the point of re-recording the album from a production standpoint (it's going to have had more or less the same production techniques done to it that it did the first time, so why bother if it's not going to improve the album's production at all?) and I just knew in my heart that it wasn't going to be as good as the original album. I wasn't declaring Ecliptica ruined forever because of the re-recording (I have the original and the original will always be available, so why would a re-recorded version of the album affect the original album in the slightest?), but I was certainly not convinced that the re-recording was necessary at all. That said, I decided to give the album a fair chance to impress me and so politely opted to wait for the release for the first single from the album.
...And they picked one of my favourite songs from Ecliptica to be the first single (no, seriously: "Kingdom For A Heart" is one of my favourite songs from Ecliptica. I do love the album, but "Kingdom For A Heart" has always had a place in my...erm, heart, since I first heard it).
...Well, on the plus side, if they fucked this one up, I know I have no reason to care about the rest of the album, so that makes this review far easier to write, I guess!
Before I start, let me say one thing in the re-recorded album's favour: the cover art for the re-recording is just GORGEOUS! I know I should save this comment for a review of the actual album rather than the single for it, but I just love what the band have done with the artwork for it: it's a wonderful update of the original artwork that makes it look like the passage of time has, indeed, occurred on the artwork for the original, but it's done in a way that is also nicely paying tribute to it. I normally don't buy albums just on the strength of the artwork alone, but, in this case, I would gladly make an exception! And maybe a poster and t-shirt of it, too...
Anyway, before I start making my bank panic, let's get on with the review! If you want to check out the song for yourself, then just follow the link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnhNPM1A4t8
The first comment I have to make is that Tony Kakko is singing in his more modern lower voice than the higher voice he did on the original. Now, I understand that the guy's older than he was, so expecting him to hit notes that he could do when he was in his 20's is a bit unreasonable, but I don't think his lower voice really works for this song very well (for the most part: I do like his way of singing the quiet chorus in this version more than in the original version). It's not a terrible mismatch, but it just seems a bit off for this song. I can't quite place why, but the original version had something in the vocals which Tony doesn't capture here. I imagine his lower voice might work for some of the other songs on the album, like "Replica" or "Letter To Dana" (which has been re-recorded in the past, incidentally enough: a re-recorded version of the song was included on the 2008 remastered version of the album), but here...not really. That said, he still gives a very good performance that shows his voice is still very good (and, like I said earlier, I feel his voice now actually works better for the quiet chorus than it did when he recorded it in 1999): I just think that his lower voice doesn't quite work for this song overall.
Another vocal related issue is one that has me wondering how much time was spent recording the vocals is that there are a few cases in this re-recording when vocal lines which were multi-tracked on the original due to them overlapping haven't had that done here. It feels like Tony recorded most of the vocals in one take (which is not likely to be the case, but it's what it feels like to me) and didn't bother to think "hey, I have to multi-track these lines to help them match up with the original". It's technically a minor thing to complain about, I know, but you can tell words are missing in this version due to it happening, so I do have to bring it up.
The rest of the stuff I have to bring up on a performance level is me mostly going "this doesn't sound too different" or "this doesn't bother me": the rest of the performances are fairly good and are on par with the original (or, at least, not noticeably below the original recording in that regard) and I think Elias Viljanen's solo, while sounding a bit different from the original to me, is still very much in line with the original one by Jani Liimatainen. While Jani fans will no doubt be livid with Elias for not replicating the solo note for note, I think this is a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't", as I imagine most of them would have been unimpressed had he replicated the solo perfectly anyway. I think the re-recording might be a TINY bit slower than the original recording, but it's not that noticeable unless you do a side by side comparison, and it's close enough to the original speed that I think anyone complaining about it would be being a bit unfair.
The next thing I'm going to bring up is, believe it or not, a positive: I think the mixing of this version of this is more balanced than it was on the original album. The bass is still as audible as you'd expect from a metal album, but the balance between the keyboards and the guitars is much better on this version. The original version of the album was VERY keyboard heavy, which made it rather distinctive sounding, but also meant that the guitars could be nigh on impossible to hear properly when the keyboards were playing and some of the subtleties of the drumming would require ridiculously good hearing to make them out (or playing the album at a really loud volume). This fixes that issue by pushing the keyboards back a fair bit...maybe a tiny bit too much, in fact, as I found the keyboards a bit hard to hear at points! I'm sure a lot of people will not be impressed with the album for that reason, but I think the mix just sounds a bit more balanced, as you have less instruments fighting to be heard than you do on the original album.
The rest of the production is...well, nothing special, in all honesty. A lot of people say Nuclear Blast's albums all sound overproduced and, while I normally would counter by saying that "overproduced" is a term that not a lot of people seem to use properly (it doesn't mean "it sounds too cleanly produced for my liking", guys! It does have a lot of factors that make it up (as you can see here), so there is a lot of understandable disagreement as to what does qualify as "overproduced", but I'm pretty sure a clean production with no effects over it is NOT what counts as overproduction!), I think I do have to agree that there's something about the production of the re-recording that doesn't sit well with me. It does seem a bit too...well, the best way I can think of putting it is that it sounds like the drums were recorded too loudly and it has affected the quality of the drum recording enough to put me off how it sounds compared to the original album. I've done a few bits of post-production on my YouTube videos whenever I've spoken too loudly on them and the result of the drums is not too far removed from what I notice whenever I have to turn the volume down in my videos: you can tell the sound has been smoothed down and is hitting a sort of invisible wall that shouldn't even be there. The rest of the recording sounds fine, but the drums...I can see this as being the reason that so many people throw the comment about plastic sounding production and, surprisingly, I do think they would have a fair point in this case. It's tough to record drums properly due to how loud they are without literally recording every drum separately (which is rather time consuming), but, if the drums sound like they're hitting an invisible wall, that might be a sign that you need to re-record them. The mastering is...well, I've not been able to compare the mastering to the original album, but I think it's fairly typical of modern mastering in metal, albeit not to an unpleasant extent.
So, overall, how do I think this sounds? Well, compared to the original, there's no contest: the original is almost completely better than the re-recording is and proves that my concerns about it were justified, for the most part. As a recording in and of itself, however, I can't say anything is really bad about it. Sure, there are things about it which I feel don't completely work compared to the original, but what is there is certainly not bad. If you really can't find a copy of the original (for some reason), then this is enjoyable enough and gives a very fair representation of what the original sounds like today. While I personally don't think this re-recording is really going to be worth picking up for anyone except for the people who insist on getting everything Sonata Arctica put out, it's definitely not bad and, if the original Ecliptica had never been made, I imagine this would be one of the best things Sonata Arctica had released since the release of Reckoning Night...or Pariah's Child, I've still not heard that and, as such, can't say how that sounds compared to Reckoning Night.
The tough thing here is really how to rate this re-recording: on the one hand, it's hardly an essential listen and is undeniably flawed due to it being a weaker version of the original song, but, on the other hand, there's nothing wrong with the song in and of itself and, when it isn't compared to the original, it's still very good and well done...stuff it, I'm going to rate it as if the original album didn't exist and as if this song had only just come out for the first time today. If you don't like me doing that, then mentally dock 3 points off of my final rating: I was strongly considering a 5 out of 10 before I opted to go for the viewpoint of the original album having never existed for rating purposes.
Overall Rating: 8 Out Of 10 (pushed up to 8 because of improved mix compared to the original: would have been a 7 otherwise)
While this will not impress anyone who has heard the original version of the song and is definitely a step down from it, it is still a very good song and the version presented here, when not compared to the original and mentally treated as a completely new song that the band have released instead of being a re-recording, is one of the best songs Sonata Arctica have released probably since "My Selene" or "The Boy Who Wanted To Be A Real Puppet" from Reckoning Night. If you've wanted to check out Sonata Arctica before now, you really should get the original recording of this album, but, if you can't do that, I think I can safely recommend the re-recorded album (which comes out on the 27th of October in the UK) on the strength of this single.
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