Lydia Lunch.
It wasn't her real name, of course. Lydia Koch...I think I read that somewhere. She earned the moniker because she used to filch food to feed her famished and impoverished musician friends.
Punk priestess. Poet. Iconoclast. Outspoken activist.
She'd risen from the blackened scrawl of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks; a gang of musical miscreants who produced venomous, no-fi punk tunes that blazed past in a blitzkrieg of dissonant guitars and Lunch's shredded howls. Most of the tracks barely scraped the two minute mark. Even now, re-released and cleaned up by Cherry Red Records they still reek of damp and mould; a thin, dirty sound - half white noise.
Her debut solo album - the first under her real/not-real name was a different deal altogether.
'Queen of Siam' (1980 - original release).
I'm not sure what you'd call it. Noirish jazz meets noise rock. Big band sass and swing colliding with a hail of razor-toothed no-wave guitars, all topped off with Lunch's trademark drawl and slur of a vocal style.
Bachelor pad music for those with murderous intentions.
Cartoon jazz. Hell, they brought in the orchestra best known for playing 'the Flintsones' theme music. Not a yabba dabba doo in sight here though, just that voice...not the whiskey-and-cigarettes predator rasp of her later recordings, or the bile-spitting screeches of some of her other works. Here Lunch plays a coquette; her flat, almost affect-less croon sounds girlish, childlike, even (dare I say it): cute. But there's the old bite there, the concealed knife, the sharp teeth behind the soft lips. She's Betty Boop with blood on her shirt.
Lydia Lunch has never been much of a singer; but she's always been one hell of a vocalist.
And she doesn't really sing here. At all. Instead she laces her half-spoken delivery with sufficient pace and patter that it fits the music perfectly.
This is music for grimy hotel rooms strewn in dead neon light. For crowded cocktail bars where behind every smile lies a trap; an end. For evenings that begin in romance and end with a man's body stuffed in a trunk. For the salt-and-sour smell of fresh rain falling on scorched concrete streets. It's smoke rising from a snuffed cigarette, for nights scented by cheap perfume and cheaper wine. It's musical grafitti snarling on crooked urban walls.
It's all a fiction. A pulp fiction, no less. There's really no more truth to be found here than in Yma Sumac and her Andean mountaintops. But this is a fantasy of a dirtier, grittier sort.
This is for the night. And it is all so damn much fun.
Opening track 'Mechanical Flattery' sets the tone. The lyrics are disturbing as all get-out. The imagery perverse. Lunch sneers them, her accent thick. There is a taunting quality to her delivery. A bass riff: plucked and twanged in miss-shapen jazz chords, like a crueller or more traumatised Marc Ribot. Piano chords descend like they're stumbling half-drunk down a staircase. Deep drums that seem both echoing and weirdly muffled propel the song forward. Sax blasts through, spiralling downward, downward, downward.
Dear God, 'Gloomy Sunday' comes at you next. Lunch sounds exhausted in her grief as she mutter-whispers the lyrics, too shattered to even attempt to sing them. The music is played delicately and faithfully here but the sax re-emerges and is laced with far more snap and hunger than you'll ever hear in another recording of this song. It has an aching noirish vibe to it that makes me think of 'Lost Highway' or any other damn film in David Lynch's ouevre.
Does she sing the cop-out final verse; the one added later when it seemed that the 'suicide song' was claiming to many love-ravaged victims (the 'don't worry it was all a dream' passage)?
What do you think?
This may just be the most strangely perfect of all the renderings of this infamous song.
'Tied and Twist' leers out at you. The plucked chords are sharp and biting - is that both guitar and some kind of distressed keyboard or has said guitar been manipulated and distorted through various effects pedals? That taunting back-and-forth rhythm is back in Lunch's voice.
Her performance of 'Spooky' is a delight. Her voice taunting and kittenish. The song sounds cheeky, smirking.
'Los Banditos' is a stunning thing, a duel between angular post-punk bass scratches and exquisitely-played Spanish-style acoustic. The sax (or could it be organ?) creaks back and forth in a see-sawing vamp. The drummer lays down a straightforward rhythm and sticks steadfastedly to it, keeping the whole piece in check.
'Atomic Bongos' is a playful piece. Again, the abrasive, skin-scraping guitars - this time with a sort of mutant surf thing going on - the driving percussion and the rocking back-and-forth pulse of her rhythmic vocals. It does indeed boast a rather fine bongo solo, but that is outdone when the brass, guitars and bass come swinging back in.
'Lady Scarface' is another stand-out. The J. Billy VerPlanck orchestra makes it presence really felt here. Throwing down a bright, bewildering pyrotechnic display of brass and strings, only to have their work chopped and mangled, re-sculpted by Lunch's conspirators (Pat Irwin, Robert Quine, Jack Ruby, and Dougie Bowne); looped and sampled, graffitied over with scrawls of guitar and lurching piano chords. Meanwhile, Lunch relates a compelling narrative: stood up by her date she sets her eyes on a near-pederastic sexual pursuit.
Lunch sits out the boisterous, convulsive instrumental 'A Cruise to the Moon' - a delirious (and utterly delicious) fusion of lively cartoon brass and biting noise rock. Lounge music gone feral.
'Carnival Fat Man' begins with fulsome gales of belly laughter and circus-inspired music. It feels like some pychogenic comedy skit, but this is Lunch's show and there is something very disturbing here; she fires her questions only to be answered by two men (one of whom I sincerely hope has had his voice slowed to lower the pitch). IIIIIIIIII'm the faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat maaaaan.
'Knives in the Drain' brings it all together. The scorching, mangled fretwork that evokes a buzzing saw, the barroom piano, the steadfast percussion, the brilliant (and relentlessly cheerful) playing of the J. Billy VerPlanck orchestra, and lyrics that drip with malice, dark delight and regret; all delivered in Lunch's velvet, kittenish purr.
'Blood of Tin' is a nightmare; lurching, seasick chords pursue Lunch's harrowing stream-of-consciousness down into the very darkest of places. She relates this imagery onslaught in an unfaltering, moderated tone; seemingly not needing to pause for breath.
And with that we're done. Just over half an hour has past and Lunch has drawn us deep into her blackly hilarious, twisted, acerbic and utterly innovative world. This album doesn't just withstand the test of time, it transcends it. Nothing here feels dated or tired. The brightness and vibrancy of the colourful orchestration and the snarling dissonance of the kohl-eyed punk - two mucial elements that should make deeply uneasy bedfellows here unify into something inspired. Cherry Red Records' re-release of the disc (2009) polishes up the sound and adds some fine new artwork and beautifully-penned liner notes from the mastermind herself. It also tosses in a couple of multi-media tracks but doesn't throw in any more bonus material to pad the album's lean, pared-down running time. Nor should it. 'Queen of Siam' is a perfectly self-contained little world. For a thrilling half an hour Lydia Lunch has you between her teeth.
Saturday 16 March 2013
Friday 1 March 2013
The Queen of Exotica
It's not often that an ice-cream advert changes your life.
I first saw it on my parent's TV. I was still living at home, freshly out of varsity and adrift in the world, unemployed and so apathetic and uncertain that I was probably unemployable. I was trying to make it as an artist, dragging my little book of photographs (too modestly presented to even be called a portfolio) around Christchurch's smaller, independent art galleries. The folks I showed my work to in those galleries, they weren't impressed. Back then: in that city, in the conservative art scene of the day; the concept of outsider art, low-brow art...well, it wasn't anything that anyone had ever really heard of. Truthfully, I'm not even sure the phrase 'outsider art' had been coined.
My bestiary of papier mache chimeras and polymer clay grotesques just confused people. They recommended craft galleries that specialised in hand-painted bowls and wood-turned ash-trays. That wasn't my scene either and there was no place for me there. In spite of anything I landed a few small exhibitions, had my work featured in a Goth-themed fashion and art store (it was called Wyrd, the woman who ran the place had dyed hair and piercings, she loved my pieces; sadly the store is long gone, had closed up and faded away long before the earthquakes came and collapsed the entire street). Some of my pieces sold, but it was certainly never enough to live on, really it just supplemented my dole payouts.
But anyway...all that is neither here nor there; it's just where I was, at that time.
Where was I: the advert. This is a music blog, goddamnit.
Said advert showed a number of lean model types, kitted out in quasi-Mayan garb. They raised their hands in worship before a mountain down which achingly dark chocolate ran in a river. I'm pretty sure it was for Magnum ice-creams. But the music that played, that was what drew me closer to the flickering screen. The song sounded old: I figured it for the 1950s, it had that rich, glossy orchestral element, that swinging lounge cadence. The percussion was a weird mix of hand drums and decidedly world-music vibed instruments, and the voice was a thing of extraordinary power. It was a woman singing, that much was inarguable, but her lower register reached a bone-rattling Louis Armstrong grrrrrrrrrrrrowl and her upper notes soared like bright sparks of ash rising from a fire. It was deliriously, wondrously odd and it sounded like so much damn fun.
And of course, I had no idea who it was and little hope of ever finding out; this was a time when I could barely negotiate my way around a keyboard and broadband was something that happened to other people. But I never forgot that sound, and a part of me kept looking for it in other artists, at other times - trying to find a release that had some of that glorious exotic atmosphere to it.
Years later; in another city, with a high speed internet connection, a functioning credit card and a recently discovered passion for online shopping, I was skulking around one of my favourite websites of the time - a wonderful little distributor of independently-released CDs called CDBaby. And they had a live album entitled simply 'Recital', recently available, some lost treasure from decades ago. As soon as I read the description, even before I clicked the little speaker icon that would play a two minute (CDBaby were far more generous than Amazon with their audio snippets) sound-byte of one of the tracks, I knew I'd found her. My Incan ice-cream advert goddess. Yma Sumac.
She rose to prominence in the early fifties. Classically-trained; she had won early acclaim for her masterful performance of Mozart's gleefully difficult Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), negotiating its impossibly high, lightning-quick coloratura with skill and grace (Mozart composed the piece as a sort of challenge to Sopranos, a means of really proving their mettle). A future in Opera beckoned and doubtless she would have excelled. Except she walked a different path.
Exotica was a strange hybrid genre. It coupled elements of the popular music of the day (lavish orchestrations, twanging guitars, rich vocalisations, melodramatic melodies and lively percussion) with strong world music influences, a bevy of exotic instruments and time signatures that whispered of some strange faraway land as yet undiscovered by the good folks of the Western world. It was a genre drenched in mythology, in elaborate back-stories created by marketing folks at record labels and inspired by the pulpiest of pulp novels. It conjured a world of dense green rainforests, leaves dripping and branches heavy with bizarre fruit; fierce natives who conducted strange mountaintop ceremonies in honour of long-lost pagan deities. It was a world of golden temples and colonialist explorers. It was pure escapist fantasy, an antidote to the mundane, an escape into the realm of the fantastic
For the most part it was very, very silly.
The word 'kitsch' is nicked from the Germans; as is much of the English language, to be honest. It translates fairly accurately as 'cheap'. It is often applied to this genre and to much else that is currently borrowed from the fifties. There is nothing cheap about the work of Yma Sumac. But she was most definitely mythologised; early tales of her history had her elevated to the level of an Incan princess, worshipped by some isolated and insular tribe, whose voice was used to sing the praises of their gods. Discovered (and effectively diva-napped, though with her consent, of course) by some white colonialist types who risked poison darts and worse in their abduction, she was brought to Hollywood, backed by a full orchestra and thus launched a musical career that would last several decades and make quite a number of people very rich indeed. A simpler, less improbable explanation continued to assert that she was indeed still an Incan princess, descended from the Atahualpa, but skipped the Edgar Rice Burroughs-ish parts of the narrative. Yet another popular myth was that she was really Amy Camus, a Jewish housewife from Brooklyn, who'd adopted the exotic reversal of her name in her bid for stardom.
The truth is probably simpler. An immensely gifted singer of undeniably Peruvian descent she began her career performing arrangements of mysterious Peruvian folk-songs with the help of composer, musician and occasional husband Moises Vivanco (in truth, he invariably wrote the 'ancient and authentic' folk songs himself). Awesomely her real name was...deep breath, Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, though she originally performed under the moniker Imma Sumack, which she alleged translated as 'beautiful girl' in Quechua. The record label really just made the spelling of her name a bit more otherworldly and fleshed out Vivanco's lovely guitar playing with full orchestral arrangements.
Her first major release was 'The Voice of the Xtabay'. It is a glorious album. The music is wild and utterly conjures that wonderful, fictional world in full, explosive technicolour. The percussion and rich, plucked guitar underpins every song, forming a solid spine on which the meat and muscle of the strings, brass and woodwinds can sit. Male backing vocals lend their own exuberance to many of the pieces; rough (no doubt meant to sound tribal) and joyful chants, shouts and claps. The music-writing and arrangement is startlingly avant-garde (certainly by the standards of the day; it often bewilders and amazes still) with many songs switching tempo and mood so abruptly and absolutely it almost seems like two or more songs stitched together (which considering many of the tracks do not even break the three minute mark is really quite the feat). But the star, the burning supernova that scorches itself across every inch of the album, is Sumac and her extraordinary voice.
To this day, Sumac is often cited as possessing the widest recorded vocal range. It is believed to have reached to five full octaves at her peak and it certainly sounds it. In her upper register she was capable of exquisite trilling notes and delicate, razor-precise coloratura that sound more like birdsong than anything the human voice should be capable of. Her lower register stretches deep, deep down into that husky, Armstrong-meets-jungle-cat growl I mentioned earlier. This lower register delivery is, to put it as delicately as possible, a extremely raunchy vocal - bordering on the sexual; it must have startled the bejeezus out of folks in the presumably straight-laced fifties. But Sumac doesn't just stop at the two polar extremes, instead she uses her voice through every note and key and pitch in between, sounding no less confident in any aspect of her bewildering range. Though she often returns to the middle of her register: a rich, dramatic contralto. In case you're curious, the song on the ice-cream advert was 'Tumpa (Earthquake)' and yes, it's on this album.
Fun fact for music trivia types: 'The Voice of the Xtabay' is held as the one album to remain longest in print; since it's release in 1950, it has never slipped out of print.
Other albums followed; the gorgeous and decadent 'Legend of the Sun Virgin' in 1952 saw her and Vivanco move their wild, exotic sound in a more stately, Classical direction. 'Inca Taqui' (1953) demonstrated more stripped-down arrangements than it's predecessors'; the focus clearly on the interplay between Sumac's voice and Vivanco's guitar. And then, in 1954 'Mambo!' happened.
Mambo had become huge at the time and every studio wanted their own Rosemary Clooney. Hell, the record label figured: Cuban music isn't all that dissimilar to Peruvian folk, why not give it a shot and fuse the two. And what an album they wound up with. 'Mambo!' is possibly the coolest, cultiest album that I have ever clapped my ears on: those infectious Cuban rhythms, pounded out beneath dizzying volleys and blasts of tumultuous brass, the fine-fingered fret-mastery of Vivanco and the multi-octave whoops and wordless exclamations of the Incan princess all add up to something spicy, zesty and utterly irresistible. And advertisers certainly noticed it too. Go on, Google the song 'gopher'. You'll have heard it before, somewhere, I can almost guarantee it. 'Goomba Boomba' popped up in the opening of a play I saw a while ago - that unmistakeable brass arrangement. Hell, even the Black-Eyed Peas perverted a sample for their own unwholesome purposes. A couple of the tracks featured in a Danny DeVito directed black comedy called 'Death to Smoochy' that starred Robin Williams (during the time he was trying to prove that he didn't have to be all beardy and sentimental in movies) and Edward Norton (back when he still acted in flicks rather than just appearing in them). That film sank without a trace and I doubt I'd have any interest in it if not for the presence of the afore-mentioned Sumac songs and a very rare acting spot for genius comedian Jon Stewart (who sports remarkably strange hair for the role). Far more impressively; one of the tracks off her debut album (the song 'Ataypura!', I believe) appears in 'The Big Lebowski'. A film which is, of course, a masterpiece of cinematic awesomeness.
One thing I love about 'Mambo!' is it immediately takes me back to another time, another place. I believe it must have been the late nineties. Swing and lounge had made a slightly ironic comeback and whatever the hipsters of that era were called (I number myself among them, absolutely) were fancying themselves sipping Martinis while listening to some sexy, sassy retro delight. There was a show on my favourite radio station (RDU, the one run out of the University of Canterbury) dubbed 'Departure Lounge' and it was a smorgasbord of delightful, cheddary treats. The DJs ran a spot at some grimy little pub once a week as well and I'd often head along with some friends and there we'd hang out; in between the press of smoke-grimed walls, listening, laughing and occasionally dancing. After a couple of hours someone would usually break out a pole and those who were game enough would attempt the limbo (that's the West Indian dance where you bend over backwards and shuffle forward, not the Roman Catholic purgatorial state between heaven and hell, incidentally). I never drank a thing the whole time I was there, couldn't afford the prices. I was young. And always broke.
They were some good times.
Anyway, the music of the fifties rapidly changed and moved on. What later became known as lounge and swing faded in popularity, exotica along with it. Sumac's time was closing. 1959s 'Fuego del Ande' possessed a more overtly South American sound. The Golden Age of Hollywood-style strings were gone, in their place was more naturalistic percussion, Spanish-inflected guitar and harp interplay. It is a lovely album, but strikingly different from what she made her name performing. 1961 saw the original release of the afore-mentioned live document 'Recital' and then, for a decade, she was gone.
Nothing prepared the world for her 1971 release 'Miracles'.
The seventies were a very different time from the fifties. It was a time of tight pants, long hair, and unreasonably wide lapels. Exotica was long buried and still more than two decades from it's later revival. Led Zeppelin were the most popular trip, man. Scalding, psychedelic rock and heavy guitar licks, lethal drumming and buzzing organs. That's what the young people were hanging out for.
So, God help them, that's what the label drew Sumac back into the studio for.
'Miracles' is undeniably a rock album. Veteran session musicians were pulled in to lay down the tracks. The guitar was heavy and smoking, the organs fat and hazy, the drumming crisp and tight; set to odd time signatures as it tried to evoke some element of her lounge music past. Over it all Sumac sang, wordlessly and across the entirety of her five octaves, she sang. The end result is a wild ride. A thrilling, glorious folly. It is a delightful and deeply odd disc. It all sounds a bit...wrong. I adore it.
Unfortunately, audiences didn't. It slipped almost immediately out of print. It stayed that way for many years (surfacing once, briefly, under the awkward moniker 'Yma Rocks') until, only a few years ago when a small independent label laser-carved it into polycarbonate plastic and sent the brand-new (with original cover and title restored) CD out into the world, and my collection.
Sumac herself never recorded another album. She did however continue to tour and perform in a number of musicals, appearing once on Late Night with David Letterman. Her voice never became tarnished with age nor otherwise damaged from such rigorous usage. She didn't burn her way through her vocal capital the way Maria Callas did.
She died November 1, 2008. She was 86.
She is, and will always be: a musical oddity (in the very best sense), a phenomenal artist, and a truly original legend. She was the queen of exotica.
I first saw it on my parent's TV. I was still living at home, freshly out of varsity and adrift in the world, unemployed and so apathetic and uncertain that I was probably unemployable. I was trying to make it as an artist, dragging my little book of photographs (too modestly presented to even be called a portfolio) around Christchurch's smaller, independent art galleries. The folks I showed my work to in those galleries, they weren't impressed. Back then: in that city, in the conservative art scene of the day; the concept of outsider art, low-brow art...well, it wasn't anything that anyone had ever really heard of. Truthfully, I'm not even sure the phrase 'outsider art' had been coined.
My bestiary of papier mache chimeras and polymer clay grotesques just confused people. They recommended craft galleries that specialised in hand-painted bowls and wood-turned ash-trays. That wasn't my scene either and there was no place for me there. In spite of anything I landed a few small exhibitions, had my work featured in a Goth-themed fashion and art store (it was called Wyrd, the woman who ran the place had dyed hair and piercings, she loved my pieces; sadly the store is long gone, had closed up and faded away long before the earthquakes came and collapsed the entire street). Some of my pieces sold, but it was certainly never enough to live on, really it just supplemented my dole payouts.
But anyway...all that is neither here nor there; it's just where I was, at that time.
Where was I: the advert. This is a music blog, goddamnit.
Said advert showed a number of lean model types, kitted out in quasi-Mayan garb. They raised their hands in worship before a mountain down which achingly dark chocolate ran in a river. I'm pretty sure it was for Magnum ice-creams. But the music that played, that was what drew me closer to the flickering screen. The song sounded old: I figured it for the 1950s, it had that rich, glossy orchestral element, that swinging lounge cadence. The percussion was a weird mix of hand drums and decidedly world-music vibed instruments, and the voice was a thing of extraordinary power. It was a woman singing, that much was inarguable, but her lower register reached a bone-rattling Louis Armstrong grrrrrrrrrrrrowl and her upper notes soared like bright sparks of ash rising from a fire. It was deliriously, wondrously odd and it sounded like so much damn fun.
And of course, I had no idea who it was and little hope of ever finding out; this was a time when I could barely negotiate my way around a keyboard and broadband was something that happened to other people. But I never forgot that sound, and a part of me kept looking for it in other artists, at other times - trying to find a release that had some of that glorious exotic atmosphere to it.
Years later; in another city, with a high speed internet connection, a functioning credit card and a recently discovered passion for online shopping, I was skulking around one of my favourite websites of the time - a wonderful little distributor of independently-released CDs called CDBaby. And they had a live album entitled simply 'Recital', recently available, some lost treasure from decades ago. As soon as I read the description, even before I clicked the little speaker icon that would play a two minute (CDBaby were far more generous than Amazon with their audio snippets) sound-byte of one of the tracks, I knew I'd found her. My Incan ice-cream advert goddess. Yma Sumac.
She rose to prominence in the early fifties. Classically-trained; she had won early acclaim for her masterful performance of Mozart's gleefully difficult Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), negotiating its impossibly high, lightning-quick coloratura with skill and grace (Mozart composed the piece as a sort of challenge to Sopranos, a means of really proving their mettle). A future in Opera beckoned and doubtless she would have excelled. Except she walked a different path.
Exotica was a strange hybrid genre. It coupled elements of the popular music of the day (lavish orchestrations, twanging guitars, rich vocalisations, melodramatic melodies and lively percussion) with strong world music influences, a bevy of exotic instruments and time signatures that whispered of some strange faraway land as yet undiscovered by the good folks of the Western world. It was a genre drenched in mythology, in elaborate back-stories created by marketing folks at record labels and inspired by the pulpiest of pulp novels. It conjured a world of dense green rainforests, leaves dripping and branches heavy with bizarre fruit; fierce natives who conducted strange mountaintop ceremonies in honour of long-lost pagan deities. It was a world of golden temples and colonialist explorers. It was pure escapist fantasy, an antidote to the mundane, an escape into the realm of the fantastic
For the most part it was very, very silly.
The word 'kitsch' is nicked from the Germans; as is much of the English language, to be honest. It translates fairly accurately as 'cheap'. It is often applied to this genre and to much else that is currently borrowed from the fifties. There is nothing cheap about the work of Yma Sumac. But she was most definitely mythologised; early tales of her history had her elevated to the level of an Incan princess, worshipped by some isolated and insular tribe, whose voice was used to sing the praises of their gods. Discovered (and effectively diva-napped, though with her consent, of course) by some white colonialist types who risked poison darts and worse in their abduction, she was brought to Hollywood, backed by a full orchestra and thus launched a musical career that would last several decades and make quite a number of people very rich indeed. A simpler, less improbable explanation continued to assert that she was indeed still an Incan princess, descended from the Atahualpa, but skipped the Edgar Rice Burroughs-ish parts of the narrative. Yet another popular myth was that she was really Amy Camus, a Jewish housewife from Brooklyn, who'd adopted the exotic reversal of her name in her bid for stardom.
The truth is probably simpler. An immensely gifted singer of undeniably Peruvian descent she began her career performing arrangements of mysterious Peruvian folk-songs with the help of composer, musician and occasional husband Moises Vivanco (in truth, he invariably wrote the 'ancient and authentic' folk songs himself). Awesomely her real name was...deep breath, Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, though she originally performed under the moniker Imma Sumack, which she alleged translated as 'beautiful girl' in Quechua. The record label really just made the spelling of her name a bit more otherworldly and fleshed out Vivanco's lovely guitar playing with full orchestral arrangements.
Her first major release was 'The Voice of the Xtabay'. It is a glorious album. The music is wild and utterly conjures that wonderful, fictional world in full, explosive technicolour. The percussion and rich, plucked guitar underpins every song, forming a solid spine on which the meat and muscle of the strings, brass and woodwinds can sit. Male backing vocals lend their own exuberance to many of the pieces; rough (no doubt meant to sound tribal) and joyful chants, shouts and claps. The music-writing and arrangement is startlingly avant-garde (certainly by the standards of the day; it often bewilders and amazes still) with many songs switching tempo and mood so abruptly and absolutely it almost seems like two or more songs stitched together (which considering many of the tracks do not even break the three minute mark is really quite the feat). But the star, the burning supernova that scorches itself across every inch of the album, is Sumac and her extraordinary voice.
To this day, Sumac is often cited as possessing the widest recorded vocal range. It is believed to have reached to five full octaves at her peak and it certainly sounds it. In her upper register she was capable of exquisite trilling notes and delicate, razor-precise coloratura that sound more like birdsong than anything the human voice should be capable of. Her lower register stretches deep, deep down into that husky, Armstrong-meets-jungle-cat growl I mentioned earlier. This lower register delivery is, to put it as delicately as possible, a extremely raunchy vocal - bordering on the sexual; it must have startled the bejeezus out of folks in the presumably straight-laced fifties. But Sumac doesn't just stop at the two polar extremes, instead she uses her voice through every note and key and pitch in between, sounding no less confident in any aspect of her bewildering range. Though she often returns to the middle of her register: a rich, dramatic contralto. In case you're curious, the song on the ice-cream advert was 'Tumpa (Earthquake)' and yes, it's on this album.
Fun fact for music trivia types: 'The Voice of the Xtabay' is held as the one album to remain longest in print; since it's release in 1950, it has never slipped out of print.
Other albums followed; the gorgeous and decadent 'Legend of the Sun Virgin' in 1952 saw her and Vivanco move their wild, exotic sound in a more stately, Classical direction. 'Inca Taqui' (1953) demonstrated more stripped-down arrangements than it's predecessors'; the focus clearly on the interplay between Sumac's voice and Vivanco's guitar. And then, in 1954 'Mambo!' happened.
Mambo had become huge at the time and every studio wanted their own Rosemary Clooney. Hell, the record label figured: Cuban music isn't all that dissimilar to Peruvian folk, why not give it a shot and fuse the two. And what an album they wound up with. 'Mambo!' is possibly the coolest, cultiest album that I have ever clapped my ears on: those infectious Cuban rhythms, pounded out beneath dizzying volleys and blasts of tumultuous brass, the fine-fingered fret-mastery of Vivanco and the multi-octave whoops and wordless exclamations of the Incan princess all add up to something spicy, zesty and utterly irresistible. And advertisers certainly noticed it too. Go on, Google the song 'gopher'. You'll have heard it before, somewhere, I can almost guarantee it. 'Goomba Boomba' popped up in the opening of a play I saw a while ago - that unmistakeable brass arrangement. Hell, even the Black-Eyed Peas perverted a sample for their own unwholesome purposes. A couple of the tracks featured in a Danny DeVito directed black comedy called 'Death to Smoochy' that starred Robin Williams (during the time he was trying to prove that he didn't have to be all beardy and sentimental in movies) and Edward Norton (back when he still acted in flicks rather than just appearing in them). That film sank without a trace and I doubt I'd have any interest in it if not for the presence of the afore-mentioned Sumac songs and a very rare acting spot for genius comedian Jon Stewart (who sports remarkably strange hair for the role). Far more impressively; one of the tracks off her debut album (the song 'Ataypura!', I believe) appears in 'The Big Lebowski'. A film which is, of course, a masterpiece of cinematic awesomeness.
One thing I love about 'Mambo!' is it immediately takes me back to another time, another place. I believe it must have been the late nineties. Swing and lounge had made a slightly ironic comeback and whatever the hipsters of that era were called (I number myself among them, absolutely) were fancying themselves sipping Martinis while listening to some sexy, sassy retro delight. There was a show on my favourite radio station (RDU, the one run out of the University of Canterbury) dubbed 'Departure Lounge' and it was a smorgasbord of delightful, cheddary treats. The DJs ran a spot at some grimy little pub once a week as well and I'd often head along with some friends and there we'd hang out; in between the press of smoke-grimed walls, listening, laughing and occasionally dancing. After a couple of hours someone would usually break out a pole and those who were game enough would attempt the limbo (that's the West Indian dance where you bend over backwards and shuffle forward, not the Roman Catholic purgatorial state between heaven and hell, incidentally). I never drank a thing the whole time I was there, couldn't afford the prices. I was young. And always broke.
They were some good times.
Anyway, the music of the fifties rapidly changed and moved on. What later became known as lounge and swing faded in popularity, exotica along with it. Sumac's time was closing. 1959s 'Fuego del Ande' possessed a more overtly South American sound. The Golden Age of Hollywood-style strings were gone, in their place was more naturalistic percussion, Spanish-inflected guitar and harp interplay. It is a lovely album, but strikingly different from what she made her name performing. 1961 saw the original release of the afore-mentioned live document 'Recital' and then, for a decade, she was gone.
Nothing prepared the world for her 1971 release 'Miracles'.
The seventies were a very different time from the fifties. It was a time of tight pants, long hair, and unreasonably wide lapels. Exotica was long buried and still more than two decades from it's later revival. Led Zeppelin were the most popular trip, man. Scalding, psychedelic rock and heavy guitar licks, lethal drumming and buzzing organs. That's what the young people were hanging out for.
So, God help them, that's what the label drew Sumac back into the studio for.
'Miracles' is undeniably a rock album. Veteran session musicians were pulled in to lay down the tracks. The guitar was heavy and smoking, the organs fat and hazy, the drumming crisp and tight; set to odd time signatures as it tried to evoke some element of her lounge music past. Over it all Sumac sang, wordlessly and across the entirety of her five octaves, she sang. The end result is a wild ride. A thrilling, glorious folly. It is a delightful and deeply odd disc. It all sounds a bit...wrong. I adore it.
Unfortunately, audiences didn't. It slipped almost immediately out of print. It stayed that way for many years (surfacing once, briefly, under the awkward moniker 'Yma Rocks') until, only a few years ago when a small independent label laser-carved it into polycarbonate plastic and sent the brand-new (with original cover and title restored) CD out into the world, and my collection.
Sumac herself never recorded another album. She did however continue to tour and perform in a number of musicals, appearing once on Late Night with David Letterman. Her voice never became tarnished with age nor otherwise damaged from such rigorous usage. She didn't burn her way through her vocal capital the way Maria Callas did.
She died November 1, 2008. She was 86.
She is, and will always be: a musical oddity (in the very best sense), a phenomenal artist, and a truly original legend. She was the queen of exotica.
A Night at the Opera, a Day in the Moshpit
Opera metal.
For me it began some time over at my sister's flat. This would have to be more than ten years ago, in Christchurch. At the time I'd been seriously digging on Evanescence. Their debut 'Fallen' had just come out, slipped in under the radar really, I'd picked it up off a shelf in a CD store, where they'd been playing on the in-store stereo system. I'd never heard of them. This was before the glorious days of broadband and Wikipedia, hell...I could barely even use a computer and then all I had access to was dial-up. This was before the Evanescence Zeitgeist and I thought they had something really spectacular going on: nu-metal crunch fronted by a woman blessed with a very powerful voice, arrangements that had a whiff of the Gothic about them. Yada yada.
But no, this isn't about Evanescence - a band that long passed from being required listening in my CD collection. I'm not even sure where my copy of the disc is now.
See, my sister knew the way my tastes had been drifting and thought I needed to hear something with a bit more substance, something less faddish and transitory. She played me Nightwish. The video-clip was murky, very blue. There was a lot of eye-liner. In hindsight it must have been 'Bless the Child' the single off their freshly released album 'Century Child' but I didn't know that then. All I knew was that this was something audacious, incredible and very different to anything else I'd heard. Now, I'd been a huge fan of Bathory's 'Twilight of the Gods' album and My Dying Bride's 'Like Gods of the Sun' so I knew that Classical music and Metal could not only be combined, but could create something truly impressive in the process. I'd even heard another of my sister's discs - one that paired German Speed Metal band Rage with an orchestra for re-workings of their more popular songs (similar to what Metallica had done, except genuinely worth listening to).
This wasn't just strings, swathes of keyboards, and a Classically-influenced sense of drama. This was frigging Opera, man. This was metal transformed into something beautiful; into a work of art. And so, for me, it began.
I just call it Opera metal, it's been labelled a bunch of other things by many critics, Symphonic metal being a popular classification, but for me it has to have those vocals to count...it has to have that powerful, Classically-trained voice. The genre didn't start with Nightwish (Swedish band Therion beat them to the punch and are magnificent in their own right), but they were the pioneers of a particular interpretation of the sound and one that has been consistently and continuously imitated, adapted and evolved into something else.
The vocalist's name is Tarja Turunen. She possesses a conservatory-trained mezzo-soprano voice with a wonderfully rich middle register. Her voice has a glorious dark timbre and conveyes a wonderful sense of melancholy. There is much use of controlled, sweeping vibrato. Her delivery utilises a smooth legato and carefully sustained notes (what metal critics often refer to as 'opera chants'). Delicate coloratura ornamentation is utilised but Turunen reserves it for dramatic effect. Her's is an extremely well-judged performance. Later albums ('Century Child' onwards) find her focussing more on her head voice, as well as varying her Classical technique with a more naturalistic delivery: while this permits her to consistently reach higher notes it also means that her voice appears to lack some of the power of her earlier recordings, her chest voice being noticeably more resonant on the first three discs. To me then, knowing precious little about vocal technique, it was an astonishing voice. A treasure. Turunen is also a striking-looking woman. She has a glacial quality, wide, sharply-defined cheekbones and a faintly Slavic cast to her face. She looks tall. Statuesque is a word that springs to mind. I'd always imagined she would perform at a remove from the rest of the band; as though delivering a lost Mozart Aria, but no, I've seen some live footage now and she rocks out with considerable enthusiasm, head-banging to match the best of them.
The rest of the band are almost equally compelling: mastermind and keyboard virtuoso Tuomas Holopainen favours wildly elaborate arrangements (with incredibly dextrous, prog-influenced playing). He's also a rather dashing figure, working the tortured poet schtick for all its worth; he broods intensely, seemingly determined to smoulder his way out of every band photo ever. Pocket-edition shred-machine; the endlessly smirking Emppu Vuorinen handles the guitar duties with apparent delight and considerable finesse. Jukka Nevalainen is not just a remarkably proficient drummer, with a nice precise delivery, but he has also apparently never met a bandanna that he could say no to. A part of me suspects that their original bassist was jettisoned from the band because he simply didn't look interesting enough (he's kind of a regular long-haired metal dude) - that they replaced him with a deranged Viking guy with a twin-braided goatee (here's looking at you, Marco Hietala) only seems to reinforce that notion.
But first, a rant. Tarja Turunen's presence in Nightwish often highlights an extremely ugly element of metal fandom. There are screeds of message boards seemingly dedicated to debating whether she's hot or not and how well she rates against her replacement in Nightwish (more on that later) Annette Olzon in the 'bangable' department. A lot of very abusive, misogynistic terms have been bandied about - there are quite a few who do not care for her. One reviewer described her figure as 'erection-inducing'. Another critic (some panting douchebag over on the Global Domination site) consistently and casually refers to her by perhaps the most grotesque and objectifying term I've ever heard applied to a woman (I won't type it but suffice to say it suggests she can be reduced to a receptacle for semen). Granted this loser congratulated himself heartily when he discovered he could rhyme the first name of Dutch powerhouse vocalist Floor Jansen (ex-After Forever, and in an interesting segue - currently fronting Nightwish for their tour) with 'whore', he also casually refers to women, any woman, as 'sluts'. All this suggests that this dude has some serious frigging issues and probably shouldn't be let out of the house without a court-appointed minder. I mean, Jesus. What relevance does her physical appearance have to do with anything. She's not some kind of sexual puppet of the band - an onanistic prop for all the mouth-breathing fanboys out there. She's an immensely skilled artist. Beyond that she's a person, for the love of God. I mean, the guys in Nightwish are hardly slouches in the looks department (even Hietala is all right if you fancy a bit of rough) but I've never encountered a female fan dubbing them 'lubrication-inducing (which sounds horribly clinical anyway), or for that matter a male fan also deeming them 'erection-inducing'; I'm assuming homosexuality continues to exist even within metal's hermetically-sealed boundaries (it must do, look at Manowar). Basically what I'm saying is that this kind of behaviour only reinforces the stereotypes people already hold about the metal community - stereotypes which for the majority are groundless. And as a huge fan of a wide variety of metal bands and artists, I don't want to be judged for the antics of a handful of drooling subhumanoids.
Anyway, deep breaths. Now, where was I...
Before they were a metal band Nightwish were a darkened neo-folk experiment; their instrumentation primarily focused on dense, atmospheric keyboards, acoustic guitar, delicate flutes, percussion and Turunen's haunting voice. The ghost of this lingers on their debut album 'Angels Fall First' but it is supplanted in part by a much heavier, mid-paced metal sound. First single 'The Carpenter' even evokes some of the grand sound of 'Twilight of the Gods'-era Bathory - with thick bass underlying a plucked, folkish guitar. It is also one of the very few tracks of which Holopainen sings. His is a curious voice: a hushed, untrained tenor, he sounds almost tentative as if hoping the music will cloak him somehow. He gains a little confidence when Turunen joins him for the sweeping chorus. It is unexpectedly endearing. It also boasts a wonderful instrumental bridge that matches a guitar solo with a flute and keyboard display, set to a Middle eastern rhythm. The song closes out with grandiose, wordless operatics from Turunen. On another track; the unfortunately entitled 'Nymphomaniac Fantasia' Tuomas (who writes all the lyrics and composes all the music) gamely tackles female sexuality. The result is lyrically a bit...awkward but the song itself is excellent, boasting a fine performance from Turunen and more of those flutes. There are a lot of flutes on Nightwish albums. It is a delightful album, charming in it's slight naivety; the first steps of a band on their way to somewhere quite extraordinary.
It's the second album however: the monolithic 'Oceanborn' that really brings a new genre of music to life. Here Nightwish adopt a much heavier, more ornate sound. Effectively it's neo-classical power metal - a genre chiefly defined by elaborate and incredibly melodic guitar runs and complex twin-guitar dueling, Nightwish only have the one guitarist and so the duels are instead between Holopainen on keys and Vuorinen on guitars. Each lightning run matched by the other (I swear Holopainen comes very close to playing 'Flight of the Bumblebee' at one point). Turunen's voice is matchless here, she has gained confidence since the debut and this album pushes her to the fore. A small string section garnishes several of the tracks but the overall impression is of the keyboards - slightly proggy and listening again after all these years, actually a little dated (the keys sound a little thin and twee when compared with the elaborate synth-settings of today, when an entire 100 piece orchestra can be realistically simulated). Again, some of the lyrics carry a Christian theme : the song 'Gethsemane', also one of the album's highlights. 'Sleeping Sun', a song added after the album's first pressing, is perhaps one of the most extraordinarily beautiful pieces they've recorded, certainly a career highlight for Turunen who simply shines.
But...another frigging aside.
The first instance of this sound (or a sound that could have served as an origin point or an echo of this), as far as I can discern, was in 1985 on the soundtrack to one of Dario Argento's flicks. 'Phenomena' starring a startlingly-young Jennifer Connolly. It is a great and glorious fever dream of a flick, Argento in top form, boasting pike-killings, a mutant child, a pit of rotting bodies, a waterfall inside a mountain, and a load of psychic insects. It's nuts. It also has what is simultaneously one of the most awesome and most ill-advised soundtracks ever. No soundtrack that boasts Iron Maiden and Motorhead could ever be judged less than absolute killer, but when those same bands are used to soundtrack a moody scene in which a young girl hides in an abandoned wing of a girl's school to escape a creeping killer....well, we have a problem. But the theme, composed by Claudio Simonetti, is what I'm really talking about. An incredible piece of music; it combines a prog-style keyboard pattern with heavy electric guitar and a wordless Operatic vocal. When I first heard the piece (In Museo di Crminale; a Florentine wax museum dedicated to serial killers) my first thought was: Nightwish? But no, they didn't even exist at that point in time. It's easy enough to see how Simonetti came to compose the piece: prog keyboards are the hallmark of his band Goblin, the heavy guitar is to match with the rest of the soundtrack, and the Opera bit...well, the dude is Italian. Now, I don't know if Holopainen has ever even heard this piece of music, but it is the very earliest piece that I know of to hint at the mammoth and glorious genre of music that Opera metal would one day become.
Okay, I'm done.
'Oceanborn' still stands as one of metals finest and most influential albums. It was followed by 'Wishmaster' a superb release that shifted the instrumental focus to the guitars and brought in a small choir to occasionally accompany Turunen. On this disc she focuses more on her upper register and the results are impressive, particularly the very sword-and-sorcery themed title track, which is an explosion of drama and intensity, also oddly catchy. Bravely this album also addresses the Columbine shootings with the dark and disturbing number 'The Kinslayer'. Perhaps even more controversially (in a metal context, at least) Holopainen reveals his love of Disney flicks.
'Century Child' introduces a much darker, denser sound and Hietala's beard. It sounds much less dated than the previous releases, offering considerably heavier, down-tuned bass and Hietala's voice: a magnificent rasping tenor howl that forms a ravening, bestial counterpoint to Turunen's polished tones. Together they tackle 'Phantom of the Opera' with Turunen executing the deliberately difficult climactic coloratura with aplomb and Hietala gnashing his was through the Phantom's part (to this day no other rendition of the Phantom sounds adequately menacing enough to my ears).
Their fifth and final album with Turunen saw them hit the big time. A vast, ambitious whirlwind of an album 'Once' boasts the same orchestra as that featured in the 'Lord of the Rings' score. Bolstered by a huge choir and featuring a greater vocal presence from Hietala, Tarja's voice is pushed deeper into the mix, as a result it seems weaker and less overtly Operatic (although all her Classical techniques are still utilised and she is as ever, immediately recognizable. You can feel the shift occur. The power metal influences of the earlier discs are now gone. The songs are down-tuned and heavy, even bearing a slight industrial/dance influence. It is a magnificent disc nonetheless: bold, dynamic and utterly epic.
Then they fired her, in an open letter that can still be found on the internet if you choose to look for it.
She was replaced by the pixieish Annette Olzon, whose voice was not in any way Classically-trained (she used to sing in an ABBA covers band). Since then Nightwish have released two albums - both of which are still striking, powerful recordings, but they are not Opera Metal. They are Symphonic Melodic Metal with a strong pop influence. They have sold millions of copies.
Olzon has since quit.
Tarja Turunen has gone on to release three albums under her own name (one a collection of Finnish Christmas songs - in purely Classical style). Her vocals on both of the later albums ('My Winter Storm' & 'What Lies Beneath') are superb, among the finest she's ever done. The arrangements lean more towards light Classical with a strong heavy rock and Gothic influence (bearing thick down-tuned guitars that recall Rammstein more than her previous band), effectively they are Classical crossover albums with every trace of that genre's typical granny-pleasing blandness excised - how Sarah Brightman's 'Symphony' album should have sounded; to judge by its artwork and the first full track 'Les Fleurs du Mal'. There are flourishes of electronica here and there. They are hooky and compelling and it is good to hear the sheer power of her voice still.
And the genre that Nightwish (and Therion - I will get to them in a later post) helped pioneer has exploded off in dozens of different directions. Introducing a wonderful feminine component to a typically male-dominated musical realm, and an unexpected delicacy to something better known for its brutality.
Or, as a friend once said, after hearing Nightwish: 'I thought metal was all angry guys shouting, but this is really quite fancy.'
For me it began some time over at my sister's flat. This would have to be more than ten years ago, in Christchurch. At the time I'd been seriously digging on Evanescence. Their debut 'Fallen' had just come out, slipped in under the radar really, I'd picked it up off a shelf in a CD store, where they'd been playing on the in-store stereo system. I'd never heard of them. This was before the glorious days of broadband and Wikipedia, hell...I could barely even use a computer and then all I had access to was dial-up. This was before the Evanescence Zeitgeist and I thought they had something really spectacular going on: nu-metal crunch fronted by a woman blessed with a very powerful voice, arrangements that had a whiff of the Gothic about them. Yada yada.
But no, this isn't about Evanescence - a band that long passed from being required listening in my CD collection. I'm not even sure where my copy of the disc is now.
See, my sister knew the way my tastes had been drifting and thought I needed to hear something with a bit more substance, something less faddish and transitory. She played me Nightwish. The video-clip was murky, very blue. There was a lot of eye-liner. In hindsight it must have been 'Bless the Child' the single off their freshly released album 'Century Child' but I didn't know that then. All I knew was that this was something audacious, incredible and very different to anything else I'd heard. Now, I'd been a huge fan of Bathory's 'Twilight of the Gods' album and My Dying Bride's 'Like Gods of the Sun' so I knew that Classical music and Metal could not only be combined, but could create something truly impressive in the process. I'd even heard another of my sister's discs - one that paired German Speed Metal band Rage with an orchestra for re-workings of their more popular songs (similar to what Metallica had done, except genuinely worth listening to).
This wasn't just strings, swathes of keyboards, and a Classically-influenced sense of drama. This was frigging Opera, man. This was metal transformed into something beautiful; into a work of art. And so, for me, it began.
I just call it Opera metal, it's been labelled a bunch of other things by many critics, Symphonic metal being a popular classification, but for me it has to have those vocals to count...it has to have that powerful, Classically-trained voice. The genre didn't start with Nightwish (Swedish band Therion beat them to the punch and are magnificent in their own right), but they were the pioneers of a particular interpretation of the sound and one that has been consistently and continuously imitated, adapted and evolved into something else.
The vocalist's name is Tarja Turunen. She possesses a conservatory-trained mezzo-soprano voice with a wonderfully rich middle register. Her voice has a glorious dark timbre and conveyes a wonderful sense of melancholy. There is much use of controlled, sweeping vibrato. Her delivery utilises a smooth legato and carefully sustained notes (what metal critics often refer to as 'opera chants'). Delicate coloratura ornamentation is utilised but Turunen reserves it for dramatic effect. Her's is an extremely well-judged performance. Later albums ('Century Child' onwards) find her focussing more on her head voice, as well as varying her Classical technique with a more naturalistic delivery: while this permits her to consistently reach higher notes it also means that her voice appears to lack some of the power of her earlier recordings, her chest voice being noticeably more resonant on the first three discs. To me then, knowing precious little about vocal technique, it was an astonishing voice. A treasure. Turunen is also a striking-looking woman. She has a glacial quality, wide, sharply-defined cheekbones and a faintly Slavic cast to her face. She looks tall. Statuesque is a word that springs to mind. I'd always imagined she would perform at a remove from the rest of the band; as though delivering a lost Mozart Aria, but no, I've seen some live footage now and she rocks out with considerable enthusiasm, head-banging to match the best of them.
The rest of the band are almost equally compelling: mastermind and keyboard virtuoso Tuomas Holopainen favours wildly elaborate arrangements (with incredibly dextrous, prog-influenced playing). He's also a rather dashing figure, working the tortured poet schtick for all its worth; he broods intensely, seemingly determined to smoulder his way out of every band photo ever. Pocket-edition shred-machine; the endlessly smirking Emppu Vuorinen handles the guitar duties with apparent delight and considerable finesse. Jukka Nevalainen is not just a remarkably proficient drummer, with a nice precise delivery, but he has also apparently never met a bandanna that he could say no to. A part of me suspects that their original bassist was jettisoned from the band because he simply didn't look interesting enough (he's kind of a regular long-haired metal dude) - that they replaced him with a deranged Viking guy with a twin-braided goatee (here's looking at you, Marco Hietala) only seems to reinforce that notion.
But first, a rant. Tarja Turunen's presence in Nightwish often highlights an extremely ugly element of metal fandom. There are screeds of message boards seemingly dedicated to debating whether she's hot or not and how well she rates against her replacement in Nightwish (more on that later) Annette Olzon in the 'bangable' department. A lot of very abusive, misogynistic terms have been bandied about - there are quite a few who do not care for her. One reviewer described her figure as 'erection-inducing'. Another critic (some panting douchebag over on the Global Domination site) consistently and casually refers to her by perhaps the most grotesque and objectifying term I've ever heard applied to a woman (I won't type it but suffice to say it suggests she can be reduced to a receptacle for semen). Granted this loser congratulated himself heartily when he discovered he could rhyme the first name of Dutch powerhouse vocalist Floor Jansen (ex-After Forever, and in an interesting segue - currently fronting Nightwish for their tour) with 'whore', he also casually refers to women, any woman, as 'sluts'. All this suggests that this dude has some serious frigging issues and probably shouldn't be let out of the house without a court-appointed minder. I mean, Jesus. What relevance does her physical appearance have to do with anything. She's not some kind of sexual puppet of the band - an onanistic prop for all the mouth-breathing fanboys out there. She's an immensely skilled artist. Beyond that she's a person, for the love of God. I mean, the guys in Nightwish are hardly slouches in the looks department (even Hietala is all right if you fancy a bit of rough) but I've never encountered a female fan dubbing them 'lubrication-inducing (which sounds horribly clinical anyway), or for that matter a male fan also deeming them 'erection-inducing'; I'm assuming homosexuality continues to exist even within metal's hermetically-sealed boundaries (it must do, look at Manowar). Basically what I'm saying is that this kind of behaviour only reinforces the stereotypes people already hold about the metal community - stereotypes which for the majority are groundless. And as a huge fan of a wide variety of metal bands and artists, I don't want to be judged for the antics of a handful of drooling subhumanoids.
Anyway, deep breaths. Now, where was I...
Before they were a metal band Nightwish were a darkened neo-folk experiment; their instrumentation primarily focused on dense, atmospheric keyboards, acoustic guitar, delicate flutes, percussion and Turunen's haunting voice. The ghost of this lingers on their debut album 'Angels Fall First' but it is supplanted in part by a much heavier, mid-paced metal sound. First single 'The Carpenter' even evokes some of the grand sound of 'Twilight of the Gods'-era Bathory - with thick bass underlying a plucked, folkish guitar. It is also one of the very few tracks of which Holopainen sings. His is a curious voice: a hushed, untrained tenor, he sounds almost tentative as if hoping the music will cloak him somehow. He gains a little confidence when Turunen joins him for the sweeping chorus. It is unexpectedly endearing. It also boasts a wonderful instrumental bridge that matches a guitar solo with a flute and keyboard display, set to a Middle eastern rhythm. The song closes out with grandiose, wordless operatics from Turunen. On another track; the unfortunately entitled 'Nymphomaniac Fantasia' Tuomas (who writes all the lyrics and composes all the music) gamely tackles female sexuality. The result is lyrically a bit...awkward but the song itself is excellent, boasting a fine performance from Turunen and more of those flutes. There are a lot of flutes on Nightwish albums. It is a delightful album, charming in it's slight naivety; the first steps of a band on their way to somewhere quite extraordinary.
It's the second album however: the monolithic 'Oceanborn' that really brings a new genre of music to life. Here Nightwish adopt a much heavier, more ornate sound. Effectively it's neo-classical power metal - a genre chiefly defined by elaborate and incredibly melodic guitar runs and complex twin-guitar dueling, Nightwish only have the one guitarist and so the duels are instead between Holopainen on keys and Vuorinen on guitars. Each lightning run matched by the other (I swear Holopainen comes very close to playing 'Flight of the Bumblebee' at one point). Turunen's voice is matchless here, she has gained confidence since the debut and this album pushes her to the fore. A small string section garnishes several of the tracks but the overall impression is of the keyboards - slightly proggy and listening again after all these years, actually a little dated (the keys sound a little thin and twee when compared with the elaborate synth-settings of today, when an entire 100 piece orchestra can be realistically simulated). Again, some of the lyrics carry a Christian theme : the song 'Gethsemane', also one of the album's highlights. 'Sleeping Sun', a song added after the album's first pressing, is perhaps one of the most extraordinarily beautiful pieces they've recorded, certainly a career highlight for Turunen who simply shines.
But...another frigging aside.
The first instance of this sound (or a sound that could have served as an origin point or an echo of this), as far as I can discern, was in 1985 on the soundtrack to one of Dario Argento's flicks. 'Phenomena' starring a startlingly-young Jennifer Connolly. It is a great and glorious fever dream of a flick, Argento in top form, boasting pike-killings, a mutant child, a pit of rotting bodies, a waterfall inside a mountain, and a load of psychic insects. It's nuts. It also has what is simultaneously one of the most awesome and most ill-advised soundtracks ever. No soundtrack that boasts Iron Maiden and Motorhead could ever be judged less than absolute killer, but when those same bands are used to soundtrack a moody scene in which a young girl hides in an abandoned wing of a girl's school to escape a creeping killer....well, we have a problem. But the theme, composed by Claudio Simonetti, is what I'm really talking about. An incredible piece of music; it combines a prog-style keyboard pattern with heavy electric guitar and a wordless Operatic vocal. When I first heard the piece (In Museo di Crminale; a Florentine wax museum dedicated to serial killers) my first thought was: Nightwish? But no, they didn't even exist at that point in time. It's easy enough to see how Simonetti came to compose the piece: prog keyboards are the hallmark of his band Goblin, the heavy guitar is to match with the rest of the soundtrack, and the Opera bit...well, the dude is Italian. Now, I don't know if Holopainen has ever even heard this piece of music, but it is the very earliest piece that I know of to hint at the mammoth and glorious genre of music that Opera metal would one day become.
Okay, I'm done.
'Oceanborn' still stands as one of metals finest and most influential albums. It was followed by 'Wishmaster' a superb release that shifted the instrumental focus to the guitars and brought in a small choir to occasionally accompany Turunen. On this disc she focuses more on her upper register and the results are impressive, particularly the very sword-and-sorcery themed title track, which is an explosion of drama and intensity, also oddly catchy. Bravely this album also addresses the Columbine shootings with the dark and disturbing number 'The Kinslayer'. Perhaps even more controversially (in a metal context, at least) Holopainen reveals his love of Disney flicks.
'Century Child' introduces a much darker, denser sound and Hietala's beard. It sounds much less dated than the previous releases, offering considerably heavier, down-tuned bass and Hietala's voice: a magnificent rasping tenor howl that forms a ravening, bestial counterpoint to Turunen's polished tones. Together they tackle 'Phantom of the Opera' with Turunen executing the deliberately difficult climactic coloratura with aplomb and Hietala gnashing his was through the Phantom's part (to this day no other rendition of the Phantom sounds adequately menacing enough to my ears).
Their fifth and final album with Turunen saw them hit the big time. A vast, ambitious whirlwind of an album 'Once' boasts the same orchestra as that featured in the 'Lord of the Rings' score. Bolstered by a huge choir and featuring a greater vocal presence from Hietala, Tarja's voice is pushed deeper into the mix, as a result it seems weaker and less overtly Operatic (although all her Classical techniques are still utilised and she is as ever, immediately recognizable. You can feel the shift occur. The power metal influences of the earlier discs are now gone. The songs are down-tuned and heavy, even bearing a slight industrial/dance influence. It is a magnificent disc nonetheless: bold, dynamic and utterly epic.
Then they fired her, in an open letter that can still be found on the internet if you choose to look for it.
She was replaced by the pixieish Annette Olzon, whose voice was not in any way Classically-trained (she used to sing in an ABBA covers band). Since then Nightwish have released two albums - both of which are still striking, powerful recordings, but they are not Opera Metal. They are Symphonic Melodic Metal with a strong pop influence. They have sold millions of copies.
Olzon has since quit.
Tarja Turunen has gone on to release three albums under her own name (one a collection of Finnish Christmas songs - in purely Classical style). Her vocals on both of the later albums ('My Winter Storm' & 'What Lies Beneath') are superb, among the finest she's ever done. The arrangements lean more towards light Classical with a strong heavy rock and Gothic influence (bearing thick down-tuned guitars that recall Rammstein more than her previous band), effectively they are Classical crossover albums with every trace of that genre's typical granny-pleasing blandness excised - how Sarah Brightman's 'Symphony' album should have sounded; to judge by its artwork and the first full track 'Les Fleurs du Mal'. There are flourishes of electronica here and there. They are hooky and compelling and it is good to hear the sheer power of her voice still.
And the genre that Nightwish (and Therion - I will get to them in a later post) helped pioneer has exploded off in dozens of different directions. Introducing a wonderful feminine component to a typically male-dominated musical realm, and an unexpected delicacy to something better known for its brutality.
Or, as a friend once said, after hearing Nightwish: 'I thought metal was all angry guys shouting, but this is really quite fancy.'
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