Well, very nice responses. I guess I'm the only one here who has ALL their albums, from Privilege of Evil to Beginning of Times. I discovered them like 16 years ago, while listening to a death metal compilation by Nuclear Blast/Relapse called "Death III: it's just the beginning". Among dozens of horrendous tracks, a few were quite good, and the best was "Forgotten Sunrise" by this unknown Finnish band with the weird name. As I love Sibelius (in classical music, my favorite type of music since I was a child) I wanted to check how Finnish metal sounded like. A few months later I saw their video for "Against Widows" in MTV of all places and I decided to buy "Elegy". If you want a description of that album, check my incredibly-subjective-and-not-impartial review here in MMA
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As described, Amorphis has a cold sound, unique of them, a mix of a few styles. Their first album (EP) is quite horrible, but The Karelian Ishtmus shows some promise already. Tales From a Thousand Lakes, where the legendary track came from, is already a little masterpiece of melodic death. But Elegy really changed things. That album is one of my favorites of all time (again, my review shows the love), with enormous amounts of melody and Finnish inspiration. In this album the cold-as-ice vocals of Pasi Koskinen made their debut (I liked them a lot). Tuonela is their best though, a masterpiece with clear Floydian-Hakwind influences, reviewed also by yours truly. Am Universum continues the trend and Far Off the Sun represents the first real slip in quality. Out goes Koskinen, in comes Joutsen, a better singer technically (who can do his own growls) but I still long for Koskinen vocals. Eclipse a d Silent Waters were good albums in typical Scandinavian death metal vein but it was Skyforger (again, reviewed) which brought them almost back to the level of Elegy and Tuonela. Their most recent has failed to ignite the same passion in me but it's a grower, I hope.
