Wintersun - The Forest Seasons

As much passion as Jari attests to have poured into this project, it really plays as thrillingly as its position as a placeholder, under the pressure of fans for the band to just make something, in Wintersun’s catalog suggests. I was excited to hear that a new Wintersun album was coming, and I was hopeful knowing it wasn’t the forcing of a sequel to Time I. I was disappointed to hear a forced one-off LP full of all the markers that describe a Wintersun album as we know it, but with none of the attention-to-detail and fleshed-out songwriting. Rather than continuously building and improving each of these pieces over adequate time, Jari seems to have rushed The Forest Seasons and put out some unmanicured first drafts. Consequently, not much of the album sticks even after repeated listens, and absent are any inspiring moments like “Death and the Healing” or “Land of Snow and Sorrow”. Hopefully Jari really is just saving the best of his ideas for Time II, but regardless, for the amount of money the band’s fans generously put into the making of this album, it should have been more polished.

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