UMUR
"Magic & Mayhem: Tales From The Early Years" is a 20th anniversary celebration compilation album by Finnish melodic doom/death/progressive metal act Amorphis. The compilation was released through Nuclear Blast Records in September 2010. "Magic & Mayhem: Tales From The Early Years" is not a "regular" best of compilation. The release features 12 (13 if you count the bonus track) re-recorded tracks from the band´s first three full-length studio albums "The Karelian Isthmus (1992)", "Tales From the Thousand Lakes (1994)" and "Elegy (1996)". The band explain in the booklet that they´ve been playing these tracks more and more in recent years after the inclusion of lead vocalist Tomi Joutsen. They wanted to capture the atmosphere of how the songs are played live with the current lineup. It´s emphasized that keyboard player Santeri Kallio and bassist Niclas Etelävuori also contributed with original input to the re-recordings.
The music on the compilation is melodic doom/death metal with some touches of progressive metal. The tracks from "The Karelian Isthmus (1992)" are old school scandinavian death metal, the tracks from "Tales From the Thousand Lakes (1994)" added an ethnic touch and loads of lead guitar themes while the tracks from "Elegy (1996)" feature an added progressive touch. The re-recorded versions pretty much stick to the originals in terms of structure but as the production is much cleaner, the keyboards sound more synthetic, and Tomi Joutsen´s vocals sound quite different from the vocals on the original tracks, you end up with a quite different end result. That´s of course the purpose of the whole thing and in that respect Amorphis succeed in their mission.
However there´s always a danger in re-recording what some people might consider untouchable classics. So how do the band pull it off? Well...I´m sure it depends on your history with the band´s music. Almost all the right ingredients are here to create a good compilation album. Decent production, excellent musicianship, and some "classic" doom/ death tracks in re-recorded versions. Yet the compilation leaves me completely cold. I guess I feel the original versions of the tracks didn´t need a make-over and that the re-recorded versions lack the unique organic spirit of those originals. The addition of synthetic sounding keyboards is probably the worst offense to my ears, but the sound production (while professional sounding from a technical point of view) is also too polished. I miss the raw and unpolished sound of the original tracks. So I´ll be a bit harsh here and scream...blasphemy. A 2 - 2.5 star (45%) rating is warranted. I´ll recommend leaving this one alone and go out and purchase the three original albums instead.