It’s always a satisfying feeling when you hear an album filled with some truly wonderful and well-constructed tracks, and that’s exactly what you experience with the latest opus from Amorphis, Under The Red Cloud. Amorphis really mean business with this, their twelfth album, and shows that this is a band with no intention of slowing down.
Under The Red Cloud is packed full of songs that really stick in your head, especially thanks to the masterfully delivered vocals from Tomi Joutsen, who has an uncanny ability to enchant and draw in the listener with his powerful and impactful voice. Bad Blood is a particularly strong track vocal-wise, with the harsh vocals adding a real kick to the music and the clean vocals being so catchy that you’ll easily find yourself singing along to even during your first listen, and a good element to the track is that the harsh vocals are occasionally performed in tandem with the clean ones during the chorus to add some extra meat to it all.
It’s not just the vocals that leave their mark on you, however, because once again the instrumentation really helps in crafting the album into an immersive listen. There’s a great amount of melody mixed in with the crushing heaviness and there’s even room for a folksier approach in penultimate number Tree Of Ages.
Under The Red Cloud is an album you’ll keep wanting to revisit. Trust us when we say this is an album you don’t want to miss.
9.5/10
