Oceanborn

notes on Nightwish’s 1998 symphonic power metal album

I recall buying this album in 2000, but not why I had done so. I suspect it had been after I bought Therion’s albums Vovin and Deggial, so it might have been a suggestion from Amazon.

This is an album that got heavy rotation for many years; I’m a sucker for keyboards and operatic vocals in rock and heavy metal, and better still if there’s an entire orchestra involved. You can blame my father; growing up listening to Annie Haslam in Renaissance probably primed me to hear Tarja Turunen making full use of her classical training in bangers like “Stargazers”, “Gethsemane” as well as softer songs like “Walking in the Air” and “Sleeping Sun”.

I was sufficiently obsessed with the band’s music that part of the backstory for one of my characters, Naomi Bradleigh, had spent several years performing with a Nightwish revival band called Sleeping Sun. Because of this album, Tarja Turunen is still one of my favorite vocalists in heavy metal.

Looking back, however, I wonder what the hell Tuomas Holopainen was thinking when he wrote “Passion and the Opera”. This is the verse that sticks out for me — drink from my thighs / the rain of lies / a sight so cursed / breasts which never nursed — but that whole song seems to be Holopainen expressing his fascination with the monstrous feminine. But is it really misogyny on Holopainen’s part, or is my perception of the lyrics colored by my perception of the band’s dismissal of their first vocalist? Maybe I’m being unreasonable here, and reading too much into the lyrics.

Regardless of lyrics that make me scratch my head and occasional uses of beauty/beast vocals in “Devil & The Deep Dark Ocean” and “The Pharaoh Sails to Orion”, Oceanborn still holds up for me.

cover art for Oceanborn depicting a woman in a cruciform posture floating in the ocean as an owl bearing a scroll flies overhead
cover for Oceanborn (1999) by Nightwish

track listing

  1. Stargazers ♥
  2. Gethsemane ♥
  3. Devil & The Deep Dark Ocean
  4. Sacrament of Wilderness
  5. Passion and the Opera
  6. Swanheart
  7. Moondance (instrumental)
  8. The Riddler ♥
  9. The Pharaoh Sails to Orion
  10. Walking in the Air (from The Snowman)
  11. Sleeping Sun ♥

about Nightwish

a symphonic metal band from Kitee, Finland — possibly Finland’s most famous export besides Linux