Amorphis – Forging the land of a Thousand Lakes (2010)

Celebrating the band’s 20 year anniversary we finally get a live DVD from Amorphis, one of the best Metal bands to come out of Finland. And not only do we get one show, we get two full shows in a lush DVD/CD package (in the Deluxe edition). The shows presented on this DVD are a 2009 show from Oulu, and their Summer Breeze 09 performance, clocking over 150 minutes of pure unadulterated Amorphis.

If you never seen Amorphis live, you will be quickly hooked on the amazing energy and chemistry they present on stage. Tomi Joutsen helped the band come back from the dead (for some fans) with their 2006 masterpiece Eclipse, after a lackluster “Far From the Sun” and their terrible previous singer Pasi Koskinen.

The band’s front man brings their live performances to a whole new lever with a great charisma and brilliant vocal skills. Also his stage energy and crowd interaction is top notch, headbanging with his huge dreadlocks most of the time he is not singing. If you always thought his vocals are good on the albums, wait until you hear him live.

The rest of the band does a great job into adding extra things here in there to the already great songs, making them work even better in the live setting. Both Esa Holopainen and Santeri Kallio masterfully add little details to sections of the songs allowing the band to create a very solid and different live performance, in terms of how you expect the songs to hear. The medley of songs is something very special that the band does live to put together older songs from their back catalog.

The interactions with the crowd on the Oulu show are in Suomi and have no subtitles, which is a major bummer for the people that really care about what’s going on. But the recording quality of this show is superb, making the music sound great and the video to look amazing during the duration of this show. The Summer Breeze show has a bit of a ‘lower’ quality but it still sounds and looks great.

If you are a fan of the band you should not miss this great package, and you haven’t been lucky enough to catch them live (we have done so twice) this is a great incentive for you to do so they next time they tour the USA (If ever again after 2008). The deluxe edition has also 2 CD’s one of each of the live performances and they can nicely go in your car’s stereo system to pump yourself before work each day.

Release: August 10th, 2010

Country: Finland