Amorphis – Elegy

My gosh the first pressing has an awful low-resolution graphic. with all the cover artwork full of pixels.
Sound is normal for a 90s vinyl.

Packaging is great. Nice gatefold in a thick outer sleeve. Vinyl came in paper sleeves, but they were outside the gatefold, which was a nice touch. The custom swirl looks beautiful if that's your thing, although I would have preferred black. My copy is flat and silent.

Sonically it's a bit of a mixed bag: a lot of the harder stuff sounds very cluttered in the lower mids, it's way better than the streaming versions, but it's not a good sound. I have the original cd in storage so I can't compare.

The album itself remains a masterpiece that I would recommend to anyone.

26 people listed as having this release but not one left a comment about the sound or packaging???

Nice packaging: gatefold, double disc, silver/gray vinyl, classy black labels, lyrics printed elegantly inside jacket, front and rear artwork is nicely reproduced with no hint of distortion.

The sound quality: decent separation, moderately wide soundstage, good bass response, fairly loud mix with plenty of sonic boost and dirt, unlike some of the quiet and neutered remasters coming out by some o the biggest metal bands of yore (such as the 2014 Maiden Parlophone remasters). The vinyl’s floor noise is pretty absent, with minor static in the quietest ages and in between tracks (mostly audible on headphones, not really on cabinets/monitors)— if you have a better cartridge than my AT3600, which you probably do, this minor noise will most likely drop off the map.

For the money I paid for this 250 copy limited release, which is a keystone album for me, (helped dive me deep into 90’s death and melodeath and black metal back when I picked this up on tape in ‘96), I could not be happier.

Missed opportunity to include My Kantele EP on Side D https://discogs.sitiosdesbloqueados.info/Amorphis-My-Kantele/release/670983

Where do I even start with this one? How about this - Elegy is one of the greatest metal albums of all time. I know that's a bold statement, but once you hear this album you'll probably agree with me.

Amorphis began their career as a fairly straightforward death metal band. Sure, drawing inspiration from Finnish folk legends was an interesting touch, but the band wasn't really breaking new ground with their debut album The Karelian Isthmus. Their follow-up album, Tales From the Thousand Lakes, was a big step forward in that the band got a little more experimental, but it was still primarily a death metal album. With Elegy though, the band took a quantum leap forward and gave us a career-defining album nobody could have expected.

Part of the change was bringing in Pasi Koskinen to provide a "clean" vocal counterpart to the death metal growling. This added a whole new dimension to Amorphis's music. The other major change is that instead of just releasing another death metal album, the band incorporated new sounds like powerful melodies and exotic instruments. The album draws on bands like Hawkwind and Pink Floyd as much as it does Death, and the result is a metal album that is aggressive, progressive, psychedelic, and gothic all at once. It's somewhere between Paradise Lost and Opeth, but Elegy is such a unique and innovative album that I really don't feel it has any peers.

I could talk all day about this album and still never do it justice, so I'll close by recommending Elegy to every single metal fan. Seriously, there's something about this album that should appeal to virtually everyone that is into metal.

The OBI does say "Digital Remaster" but the peak values are exactly like the other early presses. It also sounds the same to me.

Good re-issue. A good feed up release, full of pictures, illustrations, lyrics and extra live tracks on D side.

My copy has a different Cardboard Sleeve and the CD is a bit different. It is a Relapse version. Should I add is as a separate release?