Review: Yesterwynde

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.

41

I’m a year into overtime now, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. I honestly don’t feel much different from this time last year, at least regarding my position. I’m back to work, if only part-time, and that’s enough to tread water. Never enough to move forward, however, and that’s really how I see every part of my life these days. Add in the exhaustion and stress I feel most days, the parts of my body that don’t quite work as well as they used to…

I’m old. There’s no other way to put it.

While I do still prefer it to the alternative, it makes things much more difficult. I just don’t have time to do all the things I want. I’m not talking about the Boomer obsession with vacations to faraway places or interminable roadtrips. I mean putting my ideas into practice. Because I still have tons of those.

Since I have, for almost three years now, continued to believe that each new birthday will be my last, I’ve decided to focus on my legacy, what little there is. Barring a miracle (and you know I don’t believe in miracles), I probably won’t have children of my own. I’m not going to be a billionaire philanthropist. No, I create things. That’s what I do. And I want to create something that, to put it bluntly, outlives me.

All my ideas are incredibly niche. I’ll freely admit that. I’ve never been one to follow trends or try to be popular. I think outside the box, whether or not people want me to. It’s a lonely path that my mind walks.

That said, the thoughts that have taken root lately have been for things that other people might find interesting or useful. So this year is my chance to focus on those.

  • Altidisk: It’s hard to believe I’ve been creating languages for a quarter of a century. True, I didn’t do much with the craft for a few years, but I never truly stopped. (I’ve used one of them for making passwords for 20 years!) Altidisk is a little different, though. It’s the first time I’ve made an auxiliary language. More Esperanto than Elvish, in that sense. Unlike most auxlangs, mine has an ulterior motive: it’s based on Germanic roots, Germanic principles, and it’s intended to foster a renewed sense of Germanic community.

  • Pixeme: This one’s still around. The idea is simple enough. Take a picture, describe in a single sentence what’s happening on it, then translate that sentence into as many other languages as you can. It’s good for building vocabulary and grammar, the latter of which flashcard methods tend to overlook. And I’ve even tested the Pixeme method myself; even just using AI-generated images, I was able to associate the image with a Spanish sentence fairly easily, and that helped with the words, too.

  • Rakentan: I’ve been wanting to build a "fediverse" platform ever since I first saw the ActivityPub standard. It just seems like it solves so many problems with the way the modern web is designed. Originally, I wanted to create a replacement for the old PHP-based forums of decades past, and that’s still on the table, but I recently had the idea of something like a recreation of webrings (remember those?) crossed with StumbleUpon (remember that?), in a federated model. So you’d have all your own links, and you could follow others’ collections to see what they’re liking, and so on. I’m…still working out the specifics, to be honest.

I have other ideas, because I always do, but these are the top ones at the moment. Other than my writing, of course. That’s what kept me going through the deepest parts of depression, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t continue it, even if basically nobody ever reads the books.

So there you have it. Another year older, somewhat crankier, as quixotic as ever, and altogether jaded. That’s me at 41.

Fork in the road

The past week or so has been an eventful one in the game development world. Unity is still backpedaling on their disastrous attempt at charging devs per-sale. The CCP-infested Unreal Engine has lowered its royalty fee. Ubisoft is teaching us all how best to set half a billion dollars on fire.

And then there’s Godot.

I’ve written about Godot Engine in the past. It first came out about 10 years ago, and it took the opensource world by storm. Here was a pro-level—okay, semi-pro back then—game engine that was free to use, without worrying that Unity would demand payment when you only ever opened the editor twice. (This actually happened to my brother.) Over the past decade, it grew, evolved, becoming the premier engine for budding developers on a budget.

All that changed a few days ago. "Get woke, go broke," the saying goes, and Godot’s management has chosen to go for broke. A far-left "community manager" proudly boasted on Twitter that this engine was perfectly fine being on an admittedly overzealous list of woke games. Fine. Sure. Find me a AAA studio that isn’t utterly broken to the mind virus, and I’ll gladly buy their games. Well, except I can’t actually buy their games; they won’t sell them to me. (California got one right this time, amazingly enough.)

Most people probably ignored the initial message, seeing it as just another fluorescent-haired professional victim parroting the latest narrative. And that’s probably how it was originally intended. But then came the doubling down. People who questioned the intent of the message started getting banned. Developers were kicked out. Backers were kicked out. The project head first claimed to be apolitical, then whined about being bullied off Twitter altogether, retreating to the safe space of leftist Mastodon. At every turn, those who objected to, disputed, or simply asked about Godot’s underlying political agenda were purged.

The great thing about open source is that this doesn’t mean the end. Because anyone can take the source, compile it, and release the resulting binaries, an open project can’t be shut down by progressive whim; this is most likely why so many are switching to "open core" models or demanding copyright assignments.

End result, though, is Redot Engine. Yes, the name’s derivative, but that’s to be expected. The whole thing is derivative, but in the positive sense that only free code under a permissive license allows. Redot hasn’t even released a build yet, and they’re already overwhelmed with support, so much so that Godot’s screeching gallery has started openly attacking it. They use the usual communist methods, so familiar from Antifa, BLM, and anything to do with Trump: projection, accusations of white supremacist beliefs, attempts to clog the system with garbage, and vague allusions of unseemly images stored on the "bad guys’" computers.

All this, because someone said, "No, I don’t want my game engine to have a political agenda."

Nor should it. Tools should be apolitical, because a tool, in and of itself, is amoral. It does not think or act on its own. It simply exists. The uses of a tool are in no way indicative of any inherent moral qualities of that tool. Nuclear bombs were once considered a viable means of digging canals, after all. And even if we accept the idea that a tool can espouse an ideology, why would we want one that’s communist? Why would we want to support the single most deadly ideology in all of human history? The one responsible for the Holodomor and the One Child Policy, the one that gave the world Stalin and Mao and Castro and Chavez?

Redot, as I see it, can be a chance to show that some people are still fighting against the encroachment of anti-human ideology in software. That gives me hope, because I’ve often felt I was fighting that battle alone, as I watched project after project adopt censorious codes of conduct or otherwise wall themselves off from rational discourse.

It’s not perfect yet, so my other hope is that the Redot team understands two things. One, something founded purely on a negative basis—that is, solely to be against another—cannot endure. This was the downfall of Voat and Threads, among many others

Second, if Redot wants to be inclusive in the true, non-bowdlerized meaning of the word, then it must be open. As yet, it is not. All discussion and development is currently hosted only in walled gardens: Discord, Github, Twitter, Youtube. There isn’t any way for a privacy-conscious developer/author to contribute, and I won’t compromise my own morals by supporting the very platforms which have spread the woke mind virus to software development in the first place.

So that’s where we stand right now. Godot has self-immolated, and I have no problem saying they deserve it. Redot is carrying the torch, but they need to prove that their words are not just wind. If they do, then we will have not only a great game engine for free, but a beacon of light in an otherwise dark time.