A friend invited me to watch the Finnish metal band Nightwish perform on Saturday at Beacon Theater down in the 70s. I had completely forgotten about this band– hadn’t heard them or anything from them in years. About ten years ago when some of the slower symphonic metal acts were starting to experiment with operatic vocals over traditional metal guitar, Nightwish was right on top of things, and essentially they set the bar against which others in the genre are still judged.

I never really got into Nightwish. The female opera-lead over metal guitar was cool, but groove is a really important criteria for what I like to listen to and this kind of symphonic/opera sound mostly lacks it. Oringally, they also liked to cover Phantom of the Opera songs which, to my 20 year old self, was super lame when they first appeared on the metal scene, and I never went through most of their other work.

As I remember it, the band really got on the map because of the original lead singer, Tarja Turunen, who was dark and gothic and had this incredible opera voice. The wikipedia page (which has a nice picture of her) has her as a “full lyric soprano” and that she has a vocal range of three octaves. She studied voice for most of her teen years and then went on to music school and that’s actually where she helped form Nightwish. All the original band members were classmates there together.

After Nightwish completely blew up and became one of the most successful Scandinavian music groups of all time, Tarja went on to start a solo career in 2006 and since 2007 the band has had a new vocalist, Anette Olzon (from Sweden). Because of how amazing and powerful Tarja’s voice was, I’ve learned that Anette had a rough start with the band, mostly because the fans had a hard time adjusting. Nightwish was all about this huge, *huge* symphonic metal opera sound that was really driven by the female lead vocals. Anette’s voice was highly trained and was great,  but had only a fraction of the raw power of Tarja’s, and some fans gave up on them after the change.

But that is no longer the case. Now in her early 40s, Anette’s voice easily rivals Tarjas in terms of power and clarity.

Though not a genre I’m very interested in, and not something I’d go out of my way to check out on my own, I must say that the Nightwish show was very good and I’m glad to have been taken to see it. The band really killed it on a few songs and the mix of super heavy and slow acoustic worked very well. They brought in some traditional Finnish instruments for various tracks and overall the immensity of their sound was awesome.

I’ve never been to a nerdier metal show. My first sit-down event, and there were easily more women than men in the audience. Age varied from late 40s to pre-teens with lots of weirdly dressed and confused teenagers. Lots of purple eyeshadow and big black boots. Pink hair here and there. Corsets abounded. As did general fatness.

Of fatness and this audience– I wondered whether the fact that opera singers tend to be large had anything to do with the average BMI at the show. Both Tarja and Annett are large women (with correspondingly large voices). I wonder if it attracts other large women to the genre, or if there’s no causal relationship there.

Lastly, one of the highlights of the show for me was that my friend, the one who took me there, lost her voice from singing and cheering along so loudly. I love seeing that kind of thing.

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The rest of the weekend was relaxing and consisted of welcoming autumn with open windows and clean closets. I trained outside Sunday afternoon and it felt great to exercise without losing gallons of water just by walking to the nearest park. Autumn, autumn. Why can’t every day be this nice.

The best time of year is here and I’m in full gear.

Busy week and I’m looking forward to all its parts and hope you guys are too. Happy Monday.