Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Tarja, earMUSIC 2019.
Finnish singer Tarja Turunen has just released her 7th solo album and has stuck with the same winning formul she’s employed on her previous albums.
Tarja produces an intoxicating mix of heavy metal and soaring melodic stadium anthems that on this album even include some death metal vocalisations courtesy of Bjorn ‘Speed’ Strid.
These musical forms are not usually high on my play lists but when it comes to Tarja I make an exception.
I do so because of her amazing voice and incredible songwriting.
She writes and performs on a grand scale and she has the ability to pull it off without the end product falling into cliché and parody.
In The Raw finds Tarja going to personal and raw places in her lyrics, opening herself up more than she’s done on earlier albums.
She says that she was left feeling naked by her honesty but also pleased with the outcome.
Her starting point for the writing was the saying ‘Not all that glitters is gold’ but she was struck by the contradiction that ‘not all that is gold necessarily glitters’.
She comments: “Gold, we think, is something polished and perfect, sophisticated, a luxury – but in its natural state it’s raw and elemental.”
Tarja worked with many of the same musicians and production team she employed on her previous album, 2016’s The Shadow Self and they worked hard to bring out a raw edge to the music to match the lyrical content she was writing.
The first single, Dead Promises, captures the feeling perfectly matching raw power, thunderous guitars, and aggression with the incredible power of Tarja’s vocal.
This is Tarja’s style.
She says “I really like how the guitar sounds: in your face. If I’m singing powerfully I need something powerful behind me so that I don’t feel like I am left alone.”
Not every track is full on heavy metal.
Tracks like Railroads and You And I contain full orchestration and have an almost operatic feel to them, but the power is still there in the soaring vocal and of course the orchestrations.
Tarja is an interesting artist. There aren’t many singers blending the often-contradictory musical genres as effectively as she does and that’s why I like her.
