Lista de Bandas Melodic Death Wolfheart (FIN-2) Winterborn

This past year, in Finland, a bearded, tattooed, softspoken Viking bear of a man had a crisis. Sick of the tiresome, corruptive influence of record labels, social expectations, and other band members, Tuomas Saukkonen created the ultimate sideproject, Wolfheart: a death/doom metal supergroup comprising members of no less than eight other Finnish bands, four of whom were the frontmen and masterminds of their respective projects, and every single one of whom was Tuomas Saukkonen.

I'm not sure how he actually made the formal announcement that he was abandoning half the musicians in Finland to devote his full attention to a solo project, but my guess is that one day he just ripped off his clothing, gave a bearlike roar, and charged out into the snowy wilderness with nothing but an electric guitar and a hatchet for shaving. A few months later, he walked back out with the finished album Winterborn clutched in his fist and a devoted pet wolf at his side.

The glory of Winterborn is in being a fitting culmination of all the projects for which Saukkonen has written over the years, and it also happens to be a bit heavier than most of them. It's got the raw savagery of early Black Sun Aeon, the weirdly synaesthetic bitter cold of Routasielu, the gloom of Dawn of Solace and the epic melodic fun of Before the Dawn; all the underlying Tuomas in all of these bands has been extracted and fit together so flawlessly that, well... it almost feels a bit derivative, actually.

If you told a supercomputer that was really good at music and really familiar with Saukkonen's style to go out and write an album that sounds just like something Saukkonen would write, Winterborn is just about exactly what it would come up with; there's nothing actually surprising about it at all. Even one or two of the riffs sound suspiciously familiar.

That said, though, it's still a really, really good non-surprise. Don't in any way let the supercomputer analogy suggest that it feels mechanical or contrived. This album's got all the grit and energy and raw human expression you'd expect from the very best of live metal shows. Actually hearing it live, I would probably just explode.

I also don't mean to suggest that it's uninteresting or repetitive. The overarching doomy brutality is lent enough variety by lovely acoustic sections like "Chasm" and "The Hunt", and searing solos like those in "Whiteout" and (again) "The Hunt" to keep it plenty engaging. Honestly, this is one of the better-crafted melodic death/black/doom fusion metal albums of the year, if not human history; the gutturals are gruesome, the guitar is gut-wrenching, the solos are spell-binding, and the synth elements are subtly enchanting.

If I were approaching Winterborn as a total stranger and didn't own fourteen of this guy's other albums, I'd be hard-pressed to find something to complain about, and even though I'm not and I do, respectively, this is unquestionably one I'm going to keep. It's a solidly put-together, rollicking good time, and if an artist this good waits decades to finally get the chance to work on exactly what he wants to work on, I'm certainly not going to begrudge him a few albums to indulge in metal's simpler pleasures before he gets wildly experimental.

A jagged, frozen iron 17/20 for meeting my expectations right off their feet.