Nightwish breathing easier telegram.com 18.10.07

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Nightwish breathing easier

Keyboard player Toumas Holopainen creates the sort of big, emotional and epic music that could easily serve as a movie soundtrack.

“I love film music, and I hope to get a chance to score a movie someday. But right now, I am still a metal head,” Holopainen said of his current career choice writing music for and leading the band Nightwish.

The 10-year-old Finnish band has a strong following in Europe, and, with the recent release of “Dark Passion Play,” is aiming for a bigger U.S. audience. The band launched its international tour in the U.S., including a date Saturday at The Palladium, 261 Main St., Worcester. The band Paradise Lost opens the show at 8 p.m.

“Dark Passion Play,” its second release on Roadrunner Records, is Nightwish’s first record with new singer Anette Olzon and proves her ability to replace the ousted Tarja Turunen. The swap caused shock waves through Nightwish’s European fan base, particularly as the group used an open letter to part ways with its well-liked and gifted singer.

But Holopainen said the move was necessary for the band’s survival.

“We are all able to breathe again and work together as a band. Having a team player that wants to be part of a band is important,” he said.

Olzon joined bassist and vocalist Marco Hietala, drummer Jukka Nevalainen, guitarist Erno Vuourinen, and Holopainen in the Nightwish lineup.

In case Holopainen wasn’t clear on the subject of Turunen, simply check out such new songs as “Bye Bye Beautiful” and “Master Passion Greed.” In the former, Nightwish laments a woman who sells out her friends, and the latter is a scathing account of one man’s attempt to manipulate situations to his financial gain (and is a thinly veiled message to Turunen’s husband/manager).

Holopainen did not leave himself out of the character development on “Dark Passion Play,” opening the album with the Poe-like “The Poet and the Pendulum,” a song about the fine line that exists between artistic expression and madness.

Yet for all its inward inspiration, Nightwish is a thoroughly outward-looking band, grabbing its listeners with a force bolstered by huge arrangements of strings and choral parts plus soaring, electrified heavy metal compositions. And in Olzon, a Swedish singer who bested the competition vying for the Nightwish job, the band has someone with the broad range necessary to cover the spectrum of sounds this group works with.

And bringing Olzon to the States now seems well-timed for Nightwish, as she can lure fans already keen on such bands as Evanescence and Lacuna Coil.

Holopainen said that Olzon secured the job not just because she has a great voice but also because she is a good storyteller.

“The most important thing was to find someone with a voice that sounds good and can take on the personalities and characters of the songs,” he said.

Holopainen also laid to rest speculation that Nightwish would not perform old songs originally done by Turunen.

“There will be a mixture of everything,” he said.

That catalog stretches back to the 1997 debut “Angels Fall Fast.” With its fourth album, “Once,” released in 2004, the band made inroads into this country with an inaugural tour of the U.S. and secured its place within the European rock scene winning five Finnish Grammy awards.

Though the band was crumbling after “Once,” Holopainen kept on writing the songs that would become “Dark Passion Play.” He came up with a broad assortment of material spanning ethereal Celtic tones to blitzkrieging power metal. Recorded over sessions this spring, part of “Dark Passion Play” took shape at the famed Abbey Road Studios in London, a place that worked well when The Beatles wanted to nurture a song cycle.

“I always have huge concepts for our albums. There are a lot of different sides to our music, and I’m just blessed as a songwriter to be in a band like this that can handle whatever I come up with. It doesn’t matter if it’s Celtic-based, or American-Indian-based, or metal. I can let my mind flow, and let all the ideas flow,” he said. “Trying to calculate in advance, that’s like cancer to music.”