Sonata Arctica
Reckoning Night

THE REVIEW

This is my first review on DeBaser (so don't expect much) and I decided to take this album by Sonata Arctica: "Reckoning Night". I must say that I liked the album a lot and it was one of those that made me fall in love with metal, as Sonata Arctica is perfect for people who have just started listening to this type of music.

But now let's start talking about the album.

Reckoning Night was released in 2005, as the fourth album by Sonata Arctica, following three excellent predecessors. With this album, the band starts paying more attention to the construction of the tracks, slightly approaching progressive and heavy metal, a path they continue to follow in subsequent albums. 

Here are the tracks:

1. "Misplaced": it starts with an impactful and typical Sonata Arctica track, with high speeds and melodic keyboards. The melody of the voice is excellent and is accompanied by the typical choirs of this group. A bit too predictable and boring in the long run. Rating: 6.5


2. "Blinded No More": with this track, a change in the band's style is glimpsed, which (finally...) slightly moves away from the  power metal schemes and creates a medium-speed song, where the melodies are still evident. Noteworthy is the guitar solo where Jani doesn't play at extreme speeds as usual but focuses more on the technical part, inserting (incredibly) only one scale at the end, and not even too predictable. Rating: 7.5.


3. "Ain't Your Fairytale": one of the worst tracks on the album, if not the worst. You're done with these songs!!! Rating: 4.5


4. "Reckoning Day, Reckoning Night": an interlude of just atmospheres. N/A


5. "Don't Say A Word": here we are at the main track of the album and the most celebrated one. It is a balanced track between Power and Heavy with well-defined and very catchy rhythms and melodies. The guitar and keyboard solos are typical of Sonata, but still well done (and very difficult, unfortunately for us guitarists...). The main flaw is the lyrics, not that the others were that great, but this one is really senseless ("All mothers tell their children to do noble things, shut up..." ??!!) hence Rating: 8


6. "The Boy Who Wants To Be a Real Puppet": calmer rhythms and more varied drums, definitely well-studied, but without those usual Sonata Arctica atmospheres. Rating: 6.5


7. "My Selene": very predictable, with a banal melody like few others, and little, really little, to keep. They could have spared us this. Rating: 5 


8. "Wildfire": a mysterious and intriguing intro, suddenly interrupted by fast drums combined with a decisive guitar and keyboard, but already heard too many times. Kakko and company try to make an ironic but power song, but it ends up being something that becomes boring in the long run and gives the impression that many parts were added randomly. Rating: 6.5.


9. "White Pearl, Black Oceans": at this point, after three decidedly mediocre songs, the listener finds themselves in front of this song with an unexpected and monstrous duration of 8.55 and instinctively, after the beginning of a tune that seems to come from Gregorian chants, will feel a great desire to change the song... NOOOOOO!!!!! Absolutely not!!! This song must be listened to, re-listened to, and understood. Finally, the band starts to experiment, moving away from their genre, to get closer to progressive. Too long to describe... listen to it. Rating: 9


10. "Shamandalie": The band entrusts the finale to a nostalgic ballad, decidedly well done, with a melancholic piano and a distorted alternating with an acoustic guitar. Rating: 8.5

This will be the band's last purely power-oriented album, so I recommend listening to it to anyone who wants to remember Sonata Arctica as they were at their inception.

Overall Rating: 8.