Wintersun - "Time II"

"Development Hell" can apply to the music industry too!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term “Development Hell”, which was used in the tagline — please, allow me to elucidate:

The term originates in the film industry, and the Oxford English Dictionary places its first recorded usage in Chicago’s Daily Tribune, circa 1988 (but I haven’t had any luck finding the article in question and I’m not in a position to pay for an OED membership). It applies, broadly, to any creative project which gets stuck in production. For my generation, it has become more frequently associated with game development, with the most infamous instance being the production of Duke Nukem Forever, which, appropriately, we can shorten to “DNF”.

DNF was announced in April 1997, right on the heels of the successful release of Duke Nukem 3D in 1996, with an estimated release in late 1998. However, the series’ creator, George Broussard, was reportedly obsessed with trying to ensure that the game incorporated all of the latest tech and design features, which resulted in eternally kicking the can down the road and taking the entire franchise from the top of the pile all the way down to being the butt of every other joke in the video game industry.

Eventually, in 2010, the IP was bought out by a different developer. And the long-awaited game was finally completed in May 2011, then released in June.

It was largely panned as middling, at best.

It’s important to understand this concept because Wintersun’s Time is also the end result of a project which fell deep into development hell.

First, Wintersun is a Finnish Power and MeloDeath band who released their debut to wide acclaim in 2004. In 2006, Time was announced as their sophomore effort — a concept album which would run for over an hour; in 2007, they announced more details about the serious depth of the undertaking:

Within the update dated 17.04.2007

“The album is very huge, I don´t know if it´s gonna fit even in the 74 minutes of a CD. The track count is very high, about 200 tracks per song. So it´s almost like two albums in one (or three Slayer albums :P).”

One track on any given song will be, say a run through the song with vocals or bass. Typically, with modern production, your average song will have anywhere from 10-40 tracks contained within it. These are recorded individually (“tracking”), aligned and balanced (“mixing”), and then compiled into one cohesive track (“mastering”) to be burned onto discs or uploaded to streaming services.¹ The amount of tracks-per-song will vary by genre and artist, but 200 is well into “obscene” territory.

Naturally, with a project this big, it ended up getting broken into smaller pieces, with Time I releasing in 2012, and Time II finally hitting completion earlier this year.

Twelve years later.

Maybe it’s because MeloDeath isn’t my scene, or because I never really plugged into music news until relatively recently — I did not understand exactly what I was walking into with this album. It isn’t that it was this huge cult hit that had a lot of hype.

It was a meme. Time II is a long-running joke, similar to DNF; such a consistent joke, in fact, that Angry Metal Guy posted an April Fools joke about it this year (after the completion announcement), and then seemingly didn’t even bother to review the damned thing.

It’s also been similar to DNF in its reception: middling, at best.

Full disclaimer: I went back and listened to Time I first, and have listened to Time II twice already, with a third listen running as I write this review; and I’ve only started looking at other reviews after completing those first two listens.

To continue with the meme theme: it had me in the first track, ngl.

The album opens with “Fields of Snow”, a vibrant instrumental with deep Japanese influences. It is a stunningly gorgeous intro to the album, building you into it for four solid minutes before it cuts off.

“The Way of the Fire” takes over, and for about fifteen seconds, you’re still hype for this thing to really get moving.

And then it does.

Look, there are moments on this album where everything clicks, at least for a moment. Those are rare during the heavier parts because the mix is just so imbalanced. There’s so much going on (which is nice — I love a good wall of sound), but most of the bits that I would find interesting are buried.

LARGELY BECAUSE THIS IS HOW THE DOUBLE-KICK BASS STANDS OUT IN THE MIX

Compared to everything else.

You can’t hear much of anything past the percussion once it gets going. And this is true no matter what mode you try listening in. I’ve sampled “The Way of The Fire” in my car, on my Sonos, and on two sets of headphones. There is no getting around the imbalances in the mix.

When you can hear it, the guitar work is solid. I have no idea where the bass guitar is, though.²

And the traditional Japanese instrumentation seems, unfortunately, to be limited to “flavor” sections in the composition, rather than worked into the stylistic structure at-large.³ That oversight really dates the album, as more contemporary Metal acts have demonstrated how well deeper integration of traditional and/or folk elements can work. But that is, unfortunately, a problem that arises when your product gets stuck in development hell. AMG noted the issue in their Time I review, and that was less than ten years late; Sputnik Music used that sentiment in their Time II review, as well, with their review summary reading as: “'Time II' is an album recorded 15 years ago and it sounds every minute its true age.”

There are a lot of good-but-poorly-executed ideas here. And Sputnik’s review has more details on the WHYs, so if you want to know more, I suggest reading it.

As much as I love the scope of the concept, musically, it just doesn’t work. It isn’t practical. “Storm” should be one of the standout songs of the year — in its bones, it is excellent in so many ways — but it’s very difficult to listen to.

Time II is a mess. If we could get a remastered version with a bit of cleaning done, it could be seriously good. For now, though, it’s just….an unfortunate disaster resulting from too many big ideas with too little restraint and direction in the execution.

Rating: Orange

1. I am not intimately familiar with the process; I’m certain that there is a lot more technical work that goes into it. This is meant to be a brief, vague overview.

2. I’m only half-joking. I heard it for a solid minute or so on “One With The Shadows”.

3. There are a couple of notable exceptions where the traditional Japanese influences come out in the metal sections, but even then it’s very brief.