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[miko2]

Today's Song: The Smoke by Amorphis

I stumbled onto a video recently on Youtube that offered clips of the editor's ten favorite metal releases from the past year. The guy liked melodic black/death metal and folk metal, and a lot of the music he was promoting sounded really, really good. Right up my alley in fact. So I tracked down some of the bands and downloaded tracks of theirs in order to get to know them better.

One of these tracks was The Smoke by Amorphis, which is usually considered a death metal band but has evolved in recent years into a very melodic metal band which uses death metal vocals only part of the time. They're from Finland. As I've probably said before, I sometimes feel like 75% of all the really good metal bands in the world come from Finland. Amorphis also, according to Wikipedia, bases a lot of songs on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. (Actually they say that themselves on their web page -- and they describe themselves as "progressive metal" these days.)

Anyway The Smoke has a beautiful, haunting guitar melody and has been in heavy rotation on my iPod for several weeks now. The singer has a very nice voice. He kind of reminds me of Chris Cornell a bit in his looks (although someone on Youtube thought he looked like Jack Sparrow, heh). So I finally decided to download another track by the band today. I think the reason I resisted this long is that the "death metal" tag made me shy away. I sometimes find bands with death metal growling vocals that I like, but usually they're few and far between. However, The Smoke was such an awesome song that I couldn't resist. I downloaded House of Sleep, and I can already tell I'm going to like it as well. Eventually I'll pick up the whole cd, I'm sure.

Amorphis - The Smoke
Amorphis - House of Sleep

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