My Introduction to Stratovarius. The absolute belter that is Survive.

I have written that I have been looking to take a more active interest with music before on this site. While I was digging through the discounted vinyl section at my local music store I came across Stratovarius Survive. It had an awesome cover (one of the reasons I love vinyl and metal) and a sticker proclaiming it to be “symphonic metal”. Now I don’t know if that is an actual genre but it was enough to get me to buy the album. I got home and put it on the turntable and was blown away!

As an introduction to the band, they have been around for a while, originally founded back in 1984 under the name “Black Water” they have 16 studio albums to their name with the release of Survive in 2022. They are a 5 man band and the line up had changed over the years as you can expect. If have quite the Wikipedia article if you’d like to read up on them.

I had bounced off the metal genre before because some artists were way too aggressive and in the case of growling vocalists, I just couldn’t understand them! It just came across as just a lot of angry noise to me and not something I would want to listen to for fun. Stratovarius was one of the bands that changed that.

Timo Kotipelto sings power and passion but also clarity. I can hear and understand him without issue and he sits comfortably in the music mix. Special mention must go to the combination of Rolf Pilve & Lauri Porra on drums and bass. The rhythm in this album is fantastic as it isn’t frantic and lets off to let the songs breathe (for example the quiet sections in “We Are Not Alone”) with some excellent drum fills and flourishes.

My top 3 tracks are in the back half of the album. Glory Days, Breakaway and Before The Fall are back to back and make for an excellent 15 minutes of music. The album signs off with an 11 minute track called Voice of Thunder, which when I first listened to it I thought was 2 separate tracks! In fairness to the rest of the album, I cannot say there is a weak track in the whole thing, the album goes hard for almost an hour.

All in all, I highly recommend them album if you’d like to experience power metal. The experience for me has been so positive that I have started listening to their back catalogue as well as to try other artists in the genre. I will be writing more about artists and albums I discover as I wonder through this new realm of music for me.

If you’d like to give them a listen you can find them on Spotify and on YouTube. Amazon also stocks their CD and Vinyl.