Tarja (Finland) – At Sea (single/future album track)

I switched away at the last minute from what I intended to write about tonight to this astonishing new track from Tarja (Turunen), the Finnish symphonic metal vocal maestro still famous as a founder member of symphonic metal legends Nightwish even though she parted company with them over 20 years ago.

In doing so I had to put aside the aspiring artists we usually support for a day to feature one with decades of experience but for those artists there is much to be learned from what you will hear.

Tarja as she is now known has reinvented herself numerous times during the last two decades but with this single ‘At Sea’, which I believe will also be a track on the album, ‘Frisson Noir’, which will be released on 12^th June, and which she describes as “my heaviest record to date”, she moves into virgin territory again.

The album features collaborations with Dani Filth, Apocalyptica, Marko Hietala, and Chad Smith. Hietala, also once of Nightwish of course, has been a regular collaborator with Tarja both ways over the last couple of years and they have completed several tours together.

Her position is that a frisson is experienced at the moment when music sends a shiver through the body, the instant when sound stops being just sound and becomes emotion, memory, and physical sensation. Ergo the ‘Frisson Noir’, the dark shiver.

With ‘At Sea’ alone she has pretty much invented a new genre of her own and it is packed with frissons from beginning to end, extending over 10 minutes, like some of those old Nightwish opuses.

It starts off like a piano recital, then a violin piece.

From a minute in it is a rock opera, punctuated by distinct Abba-like piano chords around the 4:20 mark which then turn into a classical piano presentation.

Then at 5:00 the symphonic metal section is parachuted in, complete with full orchestra, which must have meant a lot of parachutes. It sounds like every symphony orchestra in Finland has been brought to bear on it.

The power is overwhelming and you might well be convinced you are listening to the 1812 Overture 2.0.

Then at 7:30 it suddenly and totally unexpectedly collapses into a gentle piano melody that might be an ice cream van’s call to arms.

But we aren’t finished yet, no sir. Then follows a monumental cinematic anthem rounded off by hard-jabbing metal that I’m sure Pete Hegseth would love to attach to videos of some or other missile site being “obliterated” or whatever today’s buzzword is.

The last word is left to Tarja, with a Shirley Bassey-like vocal passage that morphs into fabulous metallic soprano of the standard of her own, exceptional, ‘The Golden Chamber’ before the piece plays out with a Liberace-style piano flourish that is an extension of the opening section.

There is so much going on that it is difficult to keep up with it all and you’ll need several concentrated hearings to take it all in. Lord knows what it will be like in concert if she ever plays it.

I rarely use the word magnificent to describe even a composition of this magnitude but it wholly deserves that epithet.

Lost at sea; all at sea; between the devil and the deep blue sea, there are plenty if idioms that could be used as headlines for this review but I’ll opt instead for a ‘sea change’, which is what Tarja has enacted here and as much as she has already made her mark in the music business this album if it is to this standard, is set to carry her to a whole new level.

(Continues after the Spotify link).

Find her on:

Website: https://tarjaturunen.com/home-tarja/