Last Updated on 09:29 AM by Giorgos Tsekas
Genre: Symphonic/Power Metal
Country: Finland
Label: Nuclear Blast
Year: 2018
Nightwish are finally back after one year and a half of silence, ready to embark a worldwide tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the band. In addition to this tour, the band is releasing a compilation album entitled “Decades” and the fans are happier than ever.
This double disc is a journey throughout the entire Nightwish history; it starts from today’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful”, with “The Greatest Show On Earth”, to go back to “Nightwish”, the band’s first demo from 1996, including two or three tracks from each album of their catalogue. This “essentials” album goes from the present to the past. Tuomas Holopainen, the mastermind and keyboard player of the band, chose the songs that made it to the final cut, in order to create an album that indicates the band’s finest moments so far. Their three highlights, “The Greatest Show On Earth”, “The Poet And The Pendulum” and “Ghost Love Score”, featuring all three vocalists so far, Floor Jansen, Anette Olzon and Tarja Turunen respectively could not be skipped, yet in my humble opinion some truly essentials are missing. The “Once” era includes only “Nemo” and “Wish I Had An Angel”, two of the band’s easiest listening songs to date, instead of some greater compositions from the album, yet more obscure, such as “Dark Chest Of Wonders” and “Creek Mary’s Blood”, while the Oceanborn era is missing the band’s greatest compositions so far; “Stargazers” and “The Pharaoh Sails To Orion”.
Fortunately, the album does not simply present some hits and mainstreams, however it is missing some incredibly important points of Nightwish’s compositional history. Where is “Bless The Child” and “She Is My Sin”? “Where is “Astral Romance” and “Ever Dream”? After all, it’s Nightwish. It’s brilliant, well-structured musical pieces of art, so…
5/6