It’s been a few years since my favorite group put out a new album, but the time has finally arrived. Yesterwynde came out last month, and I’ve got some things to say about it.
Nightwish remains at the top of my list of favorites, as they have for almost two decades now. Their music truly has touched me in many ways. It’s emotional, which carried me through some tough times. It’s inspiring, to the point of providing me with titles for about a dozen of my stories. Most of all, it’s just good music. Considering what the media tries to push these days, that’s a rare occurrence indeed.
Yesterwynde, however, is…a bit of a conundrum. It marks another shift in lineup, as Marko Hietala left the band a few years ago. His replacement on bass doesn’t sing. Than means male lead vocals fall to Troy Donockley—admittedly, he did most of the male singing on Human :II: Nature—who also plays…bagpipes. (Metal is weird, in case you’re wondering.)
Concept-wise, it’s not fully coherent, but there are definite themes that run throughout. From what I can tell, it’s envisioned as completing a trilogy that began with Endless Forms Most Beautiful. What that tells me is something I’ll save for the conclusion.
Anyway, on to the song-by-song.
Yesterwynde
The opening, and title, track sets the tone for the whole album. It starts with a very Nightwish symphonic and choral intro, tosses in some piping, and lets Floor Jansen show off. Very traditional, but you can already sense a shift in the tone of the album. There seem to be more minor chords and more drops that give the song a sense of sadness that was totally missing from the last two albums.
At the beginning, even before the strings, is another recurring theme, in the form of a film projector sound. The word "yesterwynde" is a pure neologism that, broadly speaking, refers to nostalgia, the longing for the past. That sense permeates the entire album, and the projector noise only reinforces the notion that we’re looking back. Compare this to Endless Forms, which always gave me the feeling of being looked at.
An Ocean Of Strange Islands
Now we get to the first "real" song, and it’s much more metal. It hearkens back to "Stargazers" and "Devil And The Deep Dark Ocean" in its energy and feel. In my view, that’s another way Yesterwynde invokes nostalgia: it’s as if you’re listening to a greatest hits album that doesn’t actually have any of the songs.
In terms of theme, it’s hard to tell just what these strange islands are, but I suspect that, in this instance at least, they’re worlds like Earth. Phrases like "universal mariners" and "the starbound quay" hint at that, while also reminding us that Nightwish has always been a very sea-focused band.
The Antikythera Mechanism
The object referred to in the title of this one, the Antikythera Mechanism, is the oldest known analog computer, a Greek invention from Late Antiquity that functioned as an orrery. Finding it changed a lot of what we thought we knew about that era, and technological progress as a whole.
The song gives a hint of that: "Your father’s voice, no more unheard." What it also gives is an unusual rhythm for the verses, interspersed with a rapid-fire refrain that opens up as it progresses, both filled with lofty lyrics that still come across as down-to-earth. This is also the first reference to the "weave", a theme that we’ll pick up later.
The Day Of…
No, the title didn’t get cut off. That’s really what it’s called. The day of…what, you might ask? Reckoning, I would assume, because this track definitely has an apocalyptic vibe. Rather, it’s closer to a deconstruction of apocalypse.
This is where Nightwish, like many metal acts, makes you think. For the whole song, Jansen is rattling off various ways the world might end. Y2K, overpopulation, global warming, and other such falsehoods. The best part is, she’s mocking them. She’s laughing at all these crazy theories humans have devised for the end times. And that goes all the way up to the present, the "mind virus" (which can only be a reference to woke progressivism) and the urge to "obey, stay away, cover up" that too many people submitted to in 2020.
"The Day Of…" thus feels like a rejection of the modern ideology, the state religion of fear impressed upon us. But it’s not a call for returning to tradition, either.
Perfume Of The Timeless
I barely know what to say about "Perfume Of The Timeless". It’s just one of those songs that gets into your mind, your very soul, and makes itself at home there. An 8-minute epic that evokes pretty much anything you could think of, if you squint hard enough. Symphony and metal intertwined. And, best of all, that chorus. The second line of it, to be precise: "We are because of a million loves."
Those seven words, in my opinion, encapsulate not only the overarching theme of Yesterwynde, but the feeling it seems to want you to feel. We’re human. We have human emotions. And this song isn’t saying that we live for love, but because of love. We’re here because our parents loved each other (or tried to), because their parents did, and so on. It’s the spiritual counterpart to what I consider the most important line of "The Greatest Show On Earth": "Not a single one of your fathers died young."
It’s humanism, plain and simple. It is the sense that we all have things in common, that there are universals among our species. And that we owe our lives to the humans who came before us.
Sway
After the humanist national anthem, we get "Sway", an airy ballad that lets both vocalists shine in harmony. Nothing too complex or even deep here, just good singing and an undercurrent of innocence. That’s another Nightwish standard, going all the way back to the 90s. There’s a bit of whimsy in here, that then stands in counterpoint to the bridge speaking of some unknown big reveal. Death? Revelation? Whatever it is, we should greet it with the eyes of a child.
The Children Of ‘Ata
Speaking of children, next up is "The Children Of ‘Ata". Not sure what ‘Ata is; my admittedly cursory search came up with a mythical Polynesian island, sort of a Pacific Atlantis or Hyperborea. The song starts with a chant in a Polynesian language—I think it’s Tongan?—lending credence to that theory.
Besides that, this is a song that confuses me. It works in the lyrical theme of a mariner, as in "An Ocean Of Strange Islands", but also the "watchers" theme from "Edema Ruh" and the endurance theme from the climax of "The Greatest Show On Earth", both on Endless Forms, the notion that we’re being watched and judged by someone beyond our knowledge. In this case, based on the rest of Yesterwynde, that someone is…our children. Future generations looking back, probably wondering what in the world we were thinking.
Oh, and there’s a haka. I think it’s a haka, anyway. Sounds like one. And that reminds me of Christopher Tin’s "Kia Hora Te Marino". Nothing wrong with that.
Something Whispered Follow Me
A nighttime visitor, physical or spiritual. A call of the wild, beckoning you to step into the unknown, into the land of fantasy that waits beyond the "normal". Every metal band does it, apparently. Queensryche made a hit of it. Avantasia wrote two whole albums about it. Nightwish themselves put it in a song ("Elvenpath", in case you’re wondering) when I was still in middle school.
This rendition of that timeless trope is nothing spectacular, but it’s solid. Hard. It urges us to find something real by, paradoxically enough, embracing flights of fancy. And it’s another song with humanist trappings, reminding us that our lives are works of art simply by us living them.
Spider Silk
Here’s another song where I don’t know what to say. Unlike "Perfume Of The Timeless", it’s not because I was bowled over by it. No, "Spider Silk" is simply…uninspiring. It’s literally a song about spiders, and it just isn’t a very good one.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The track has a catchy beat. When I listened to it at home, relaxing, I was immediately put off. But the second time, driving across the state to see the woman I love, I found myself almost singing along. So it’s the very rare case of a symphonic metal band creating a…pop song? That’s really what it feels like.
The Weave
Spiders, of course, weave webs. That’s what they’re known for. And weaving is a very important theme in Yesterwynde. Stories are woven. Tapestries are woven. And I’d say that all comes about because fate, in many older traditions, is also something woven.
As for "The Weave" as a song, there’s little to say. It’s definitely a filler track, but at least it has a gimmick: the whole thing is, with one exception, a palindrome. What that means, I have no idea.
Hiraeth
I put this out of order purely to keep "Spider Silk" and "The Weave" together. Well, also because it deserves more words. This is another ballad, one far more downcast than "Sway". For reference, hiraeth is the Welsh word for nostalgia, and thus basically a translation of Yesterwynde itself.
Even if you didn’t know that, you could probably figure it out if you listened to the lyrics. The verses are sung by Troy here, with Floor harmonizing in the refrains. And it does seem to be his song, his time in the spotlight as male lead.
He couldn’t have picked a better one. "Hiraeth" is all about looking back, about reaching out for what has passed us by. It’s sad in a bittersweet way, and it’s all too real. Life is full of hurts, of pain and loss. And that wears us down to the point where we do start to long for the days of old. Pain and sorrow and living with the thought that maybe we could’ve done something different to prevent it—that’s called being human.
And that’s why "Hiraeth" hits hard, despite being tucked away near the end of the album. It’s almost a hidden gem of a "sad" song. It makes you think. It makes you dwell on the past, and then realize what you’re doing.
Lanternlight
Last, we come to "Lanternlight". This is more of a story than a song, a bit of free verse that caps our journey through the rose-tinted world of memory. Musically speaking, it’s really nothing more than Floor Jansen’s rehearsal. If you’ve heard her cover of Heart’s "Alone", you’ll wonder if she used that to practice for this. (If you haven’t heard that, check it out. It’s amazing.)
For some reason, I can’t get through "Lanternlight" without crying, and I don’t really understand why. It’s not overly sad. Very bittersweet, yes, but not something intended to get the tears flowing. All I’ve been able to figure out is a sequence in the penultimate verse: "I hear our song now, sung by the free / For a thousand more tomorrows / Of an incomplete weave". That’s the part that gets misty for me, and the only reason I can think of is because I just don’t believe I’ll even see a thousand more tomorrows.
Conclusion
Overall, Yesterwynde is a good album. It’s not the greatest, far from the worst, and very much a coherent whole. Even the filler tracks ("Spider Silk", "The Weave") contribute to the primary themes of fate, humanity, humanism, and the idea that we live not for ourselves, but for those who are yet to come. That our descendants, our children and their children and their children, will be the ones who tell our story, not us.
On top of that, it’s nostalgic in the music sense, too. At almost every point in the album, you’ll hear something that sounds enough like an older Nightwish song that it tickles your ear and makes you think back to Once or Oceanborn or whatever. It’s new, but it’s not completely fresh. Instead, it builds off what came before.
If anything, that’s the message right there, and I can see how it’s the cap to a trilogy. Endless Forms Most Beautiful set us in our place in the universe, in the chain of evolution that stretches back to the birth of our world. Human :II: Nature places us in the world, contrasting our human ingenuity with the natural wonders around us. And Yesterwynde roots us in time, reminding us that the way we look back on our ancestors is exactly the way we will be looked upon by future generations.
So maybe we should act like it.