Nightwish is an indulgence of mine. Evolutionary biology meets symphonic metal. Let me explain.
When I am not 100% focused on music, I do things that often involve spending a lot of time on a computer. This includes my profession. When in serious productivity mode, having music playing in the background helps me focus by drowning out incidental and environmental noises, as well as giving me an energy boost.
I cannot split my attention between work that pays the bills and serious listening – it is one or the other. So, over the years I have collected a few dozen albums that I know well, are enjoyable, and serve this background function. Every so often, a “background” album evolves into a “foreground” album, as was the case here.
Several years ago and on the recommendation of a friend, I started listening to Nightwish, a symphonic metal band from Finland. Unlike many attempted mergers of metal and orchestral music, Nightwish generally nails it. They incorporate a full orchestra as well as a choir on many of their recordings. The music seems to be written with the amalgam of rock band, symphony, and voices in mind rather than some being grafted onto the others as an afterthought. The orchestral portions were arranged by composer Pip Williams (who has also worked with the Moody Blues) interactively from a framework set forth by Nightwish’s main songwriter, Tuomas Holopainen.
I explored Nightwish regularly throughout the recent COVID years. Starting with the all-instrumental versions of Dark Passion Play, Imaginaerum, and Endless Forms Most Beautiful, I slowly probed their discography and then began to absorb the versions of these albums with vocals. While I could point to any of the three as my favorite, I keep coming back to Endless Forms Most Beautiful due to its majestic heaviness and compelling lyrical themes.
The album essentially covers the history of the universe – from the formation of the planets, the origins of life, its evolution to current forms, and humankind’s eventual demise. But its focus is on Darwin’s famous theory (which has been proven factual over and over). Most of the songs address – in one way or another – the miraculous improbability that we walk this Earth and are able to wonder about from where we have come.
Indeed, the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins provides spoken word contributions to two of the tracks. I read Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene in my 20s and it was a paradigm-shifting experience in how I thought about both biological and non-biological processes. Dawkins is the person who coined the term “meme”, though that is probably not the thing for which he wants to be most remembered.
With this background, I was well-primed to receive Endless Forms. The album begins with Dawkins introducing Shudder Before The Beautiful, which then leaps into a signature metal riff played without guitar – the orchestra takes the lead along with bass and drums. A few bars later the heavy guitar and vocals join in, formulating a driving rhythm and an ethereal chorus.
The song’s structure is conventional, which hides its complexity. Nonetheless, once they reach the bridge, it is clear where Shudder is going – a huge choral passage with flourishing strings and horns in addition to the metal tropes. Therein, Nightwish eschews the nonsensical notion that scientific objectivity and natural beauty are somehow at odds with one another:
The unknown, the grand show, the choir of the stars
Interstellar theatre play, the nebulae curtain falls
Imagination, evolution, a species from the vale
Walks in wonder in search of the source of the tale.
Weak Fantasy is something of an outlier as it takes the album in a related but different direction lyrically. It focuses on how some religions utilize our proclivity for fear and gullibility to build stories through which the few can more easily control the many. This is also in line with Dawkins’ writing as well as that of sociology academics. Still, the music is powerful, with knotty rhythms enhanced by strings and horns, as well as wordless chants backing up lead singer Floor Jansen, There are breaks for acoustic guitar but the main thrust of the song is fast and heavy intricacies.
Élan follows and is the closest that Nightwish gets to a pop structure. The nucleus is Jansen’s singing, with the guitar and orchestra toned down. Making up for this is the inclusion of uilleann pipes, which gives the track a strange folkish feel. The song is quite positive in tone and about what can happen when you let yourself go, take chances, and explore paths less traveled.
While each of the remaining pieces on Endless Forms is worthy of discussing, let’s skip to the finale, The Greatest Show on Earth. Titled after a Dawkins book from 2010, this 24-minute epic is not only the capstone on the album but also the strangest and most innovative offering therein. Simply put, it is a musical exploration of evolution by natural selection. Nightwish reinforces this inquiry with the notion that our examination, consideration, and scrutiny of this universe is a worthwhile and virtuous endeavor. To that point, Dawkins reads in a voiceover:
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble and enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?
Nonetheless, the song does not stop at the origins of homo sapiens and instead continues into how this evolution has influenced our psychology. And how this psychology – penchants for religion, greed, and destructiveness – may (and probably will) lead to our eventual demise. The discussion is accompanied by expansive musical structures, tribal elements, recorded effects, animal noises, and of course soaring heavy riffing and singing with the full orchestra. The music is simply majestic and often more than a little weird.
Where The Greatest Show on Earth hits me, however, is in Dawkins’ second voiceover toward its end. As I slowly lose more and more people from my life, I find his words both hard to swallow but enlightening and hopeful:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA, so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds.
That’s heavy. But Dawkins follows up, in his third and final voiceover, with a quote from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species that puts things in perspective:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one. And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being, evolved.
I have probably listened to Endless Forms Most Beautiful several hundred times in the last 4 years. Whether working at my desk, commuting, or just drinking in the music with no distractions. It draws me in and I keep coming back to it.
If you are not into metal per se, start with the instrumental versions of the albums like I did. Let that serve as a gateway to this singular blend of heavy science, commentary, philosophy, and music.
Avant Music News 