Wintersun - Time II

Imagine there's a pic of the album art on the left because Blogger is refusing to let me upload images right now

Feel free to skip this first paragraph, it is admittedly self-indulgent and tangential, but I feel like the best way I can explain Time II and my feelings on it is through a punchline that requires a bit of setup.  A big early inspiration of mine when it came to reviewing was Noah Antweiler, better known as The Spoony One, an OG "angry internet reviewer" whose content has, by and large, aged like milk.  Despite no longer finding it funny to change the lyrics of "Liberi Fatali" from Final Fantasy VIII to all be variations of "gay" and "sissy", I actually still hold his three-part review of the game Ultima IX: Ascension in pretty high regard for almost entirely metatextual reasons.  The review itself is ostensibly just a joke and skit laden diatribe against a game he really hates from a series he had previously really loved, but the review functions in hindsight as something of a character study of a man whose manic period finally climaxed and began to flip into a depressive period at the exact same time as the consequences of his flippant, selfish behavior during his manic years came home to roost.  The real-life circumstances of his life that had taken a major downturn in between the filming of each part weighs so heavily on him that you can see him physically and mentally decay with each new installment.  He visibly loses weight, his criticisms become less about ticky-tack mechanical nitpicks and more about overarching philosophical failures, and he lashes out at the world in a way that is explicitly reflective of his lived reality, where his own behavior cost him his job, reputation, and friends and his struggle to reckon with that.  It's a captivating watch if you're familiar with his self-destructive backstory.  The part that's important here, and one of the pivotal moments in his own filmed meta-collapse, comes during a section where he describes a sidequest in the game.  At one point, he is tasked with scouring the world to find four gemstones.  They are scattered all across the world map, with little to no direction as to where to even start looking to find any of them.  It takes nearly the entire length of the game to complete and requires a huge load of backtracking.  After spending dozens of hours replaying a game that is already miserable to play, a game that symbolizes his personal loss of childhood wonder and the most potent, soul-destroying disappointment he had ever experienced, just to fetch all of these items, the reward is revealed to be a measly 100 gold pieces.  Less money than he could have made by simply turning around and stabbing a rat in a random encounter.  It would have been less insulting if the reward was simply nothing at all.

What can you possibly say about Time II?  No, that's not a rhetorical question.  What can you, I, or anybody else on Earth say about the substance of this album that is of any value to yourself, myself, or anybody else on Earth?  I need to lay my thesis out right at the start here.  Reviews are, by nature, subjective critiques of art.  They necessarily must be so because a review is predicated on having an opinion about something.  I am frequently criticized for being too subjective in my writing, and that is not going to change today, but the core problem with Wintersun's long awaited new album is actually an objective one.  You can not refute this, you can not say I am incorrect or misinformed, you can not claim I am interpreting the facts uncharitably to make an unfair point, there is absolutely no coherent counterargument to this 100% indisputable fact: Time II is the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.

That's it, right?  Like, what the fuck else can you or I or anybody else on Earth amend on to the end of that statement that softens the cold haymaker of reality here?  Time II is an album that fundamentally can not be divorced from the surrounding non-musical circumstances of its creation and release.  And the most distilled version of those circumstances is "This album was written and at least partially recorded in 2006, five songs were released in 2012, and six more were released in 2024".  Everything experiential about this album will forever be colored by the looming shadow of the previous eighteen years.

Why talk about how "Way of the Fire" is an okay song that goes on a little too long when the fact is that it's been written and performed live for eons by this point?  Why talk about "Silver Leaves" being one of the exceptionally few examples of Jari writing slower parts that are actually engaging on some level when the fact is that fans have endured ten straight years of him caterwauling about how no computer exists that could fully realize what is so nakedly a perfectly unremarkable symphonic melodeath song?  Why talk about how much of the runtime is occupied by atmospheric intros/interludes/outros when the fact is that the band raised hundreds of thousands of euros to do so?  Why talk about the mix being fine for what it is if a little bit crowded when the fact is that the album's production is the entire impetus of several rounds of fundraising and empty promises and there is apparently already a cleaner mix available if you purchase it for forty bucks from the band directly?  Who cares what happens in "Storm"?  The fact is that it's the penultimate song on an album that spent more time in the polishing stage than my dog's entire natural fucking lifespan and at the end of the day all that got delivered was a pretty fine if sorta unfocused album in a genre that had iterated itself beyond any boundaries that Time could've theoretically pushed two god damned decades ago.  Who cares?  Brymir released four different versions of this already and they weren't all that spectacular either.

It seems wrong, but it's just true, the actual substance of the album just full stop does not matter.  At the end of the day, it's the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.  I'll keep saying it, because it absolutely bears repeating.  There is absolutely nothing this album could've done that could've justified the slow-motion circus fire that led up to it.  Time's legacy was never going to be its music, it was always going to be its story.  The worst thing it could've done was conclude that story, because now we're forced to reckon with the fact that fans could've heard this in 2008 like it was initially planned and nothing would be fundamentally different about it.  With that in mind, are you pleased with this result?  Is Time II worth at least a few percentage points on principle because the instruments are in tune and the growls sound good?  Of course not, this isn't a physics exam, it's a piece of art, and it's art that I find spectacularly artless and unworthy of merit.  Do you really care that "Ominous Clouds" is a filler interlude or that Jari's clean vocals are still goofy as hell?  I don't think you do.  I think you care that Time II is finally released and yep it sure sounds like half of a Wintersun album.  Hope that's enough for ya!

Perfect is often the enemy of good but it turns out that it can be the spectre that mediocrity spends a lifetime promising as well.  I used to champion the belief that Jari was a conman who had been sitting on his ass and demanding money for years, but I no longer believe that.  No, the only remaining possibility is that he must be an idiot.  To spend so much of your limited time on this planet spit-shining a turd that you shit out back before X-Men 3 came out is the choice of a gibbering lunatic.  I fully believe that he spent all of this time futzing around with DAWs and tweaking the levels of three hundred simultaneous fake trumpets because these songs sound like they haven't gone through a second pass since the Younger Bush administration.  It doesn't sound lazy, you don't invest so much of your reputation on an album that you refuse to release until its perfect if you weren't actually trying.  But it ultimately sounds dated on arrival.  You can't dazzle me with nine straight minutes of blastbeats or bombastic synths anymore because the world moved on while you were busy dazzling yourself in your imagination with a hypothetical version of it.  This is what happens when you're so incurious that you assume your artistic whims are unimpeachable.  The intervening years weren't spent reworking or rewriting these songs, they were spent trying to make the noises in Jari's headphones match what he envisioned in his head twenty years ago.   That these songs never stopped being an animating force in his artistic career is not a sign of perfectionism or creative drive, it's a sign that the creator assumed any possible improvement could only be achieved via means completely disconnected from their fundamental building blocks.   That's not the action of a genius, it's the action of a child who refuses to finish their drawing until they find the exact perfect shade of blue crayon.  It's like winding up a punch for 155,000 hours as though that's going to make it land 155,000 times harder when really all it accomplishes is making you look like a fuckin' clown.

Is this good enough for you?  Is this worth all of the time and effort it took to realize?  Does this album sound like it was worth a half million dollar paywall that took a decade to unlock?  If so, I'm genuinely happy for you.  I don't understand you and will not value any artistic insights you offer, but I am glad that this makes you happy.  Time II could've come bundled with a gold ingot and Sofia Vergara's phone number and it would still be the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.  Nothing will ever assuage the fact that it would've been less insulting if it was never released at all.

RATING: 0%

My 2023 AOTY was Xoth by the way.