Nightwish
Vehicle of Spirit

Nightwish releases a very big live document, recordings from two concerts and some additional material recorded from shows around the globe. It is one show from Wembley and one from their native Finland and Tampere. And we get a good selection of songs from through the career but of course most from the recent album. And we get a smiling Floor and a smiling band as well performing well in front of large crowds. I would however say that objectively Floor doesn’t do very well with many of the songs sung by Tarja but I don’t think those in attendance would notice that too much and I like the songs in this version as well. And I could also point out that you need much time if you want to watch it all in one sitting as the shows are about two hours each.

Musically I think most know how Nightwish sound with grand symphonic styled metal and female vocals, much soprano vocals on the first few albums but much less of that on the later. Floor Jansen who did her best work in After Forever has only sung on their latest album and she is the third vocalist of the band following Tarja Turunen and Anette Olzon. She does a great performance and to me she is the highlight of this video, mostly thanks to how much she seems to be enjoying being on stage with Nightwish.

The musical production is excellent for a live album and the band’s performances are more or less flawless. The video is less interesting, very conservative and they could have more interesting cutting and better angles but you see what happens and it works. One could think that a grand name like Nightwish should have better video production though. I think that the show from Tampere looks and sounds better than the one from Wembley, in part because it goes from light to dark but also because they have selected a lot better songs for this one.

There is one thing that strikes me when listening through this massive release and that is how little the band seems to have evolved during the years. They have eight studio albums in their catalogue and still it sounds almost like the live shows are collected from one album – of course when you listen to the albums themselves it becomes more diverse and having one singer doing songs from different singers and eras also makes it seem more similar than it is. But the overall sound is also the same all through most of the songs and the ones really standing out are the ones from the earliest days.

I would describe this as a release that preaches to their own flock, not so much for the more peripheral fans who are not collecting everything and tend to looks less rosy an what they do. Personally I already have the DVD From Wishes to Eternity and it does things better than this one that offers very little that is missing from the old DVD, so I will not buy this. It is a good release and the songs are strong, no denying that, but there is nothing that really catches me. It used to be that Nightwish stuff was really exciting to me but this feels just like another one of those albums I just listen to, write about and then forget everything about it. Then again, there wasn’t much brilliance in their latest effort and a live releasing documenting mainly that album cannot be expected to be more interesting. It is an album for the real fans of Nightwish and not exactly the greatest show on Earth.

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