Stratovarius - Episode (1996)

I always loved rock. The first kind of music I got into was punk rock. I remember listening to bands like Green Day, Sex Pistols, Ramones and so on. Probably later here, I'll talk about some albums of those bands, but now the story is a little bit different.

One of my brothers always loved Heavy Metal and he still does. He had many heavy metal records, in the beginning, vinyl and later CDs, of bands like Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and the list goes on and on.

At some point in my youth, I had a lot of free time in the afternoon after school. I used to stay at home listening to my favorite punk albums but I started to get bored of listening to the same songs. Remember, at that time we didn't have Spotify or even the Internet where we could go and download or stream any song you wanted. You had to buy the albums and they weren't cheap. So, during these boring times, I started picking around those metal albums of my brother, and I gave them a spin from time to time. Suddenly, the gate was opened.

I mean, I didn't stop listening to punk rock, but suddenly a new world of music has opened before me. The world of Heavy Metal. I remember that I started listening to Ozzy Osbourne solo albums and got addicted. Started with Live & Loud, Bark at the Moon, Ultimate Sin and so on. After some time I got into Bruce Dickinson solo carrer. Great stuff also, probably I'll write some Dickinson's albums in the near future. But anyway, at this time I was around 18 years old and used to wear heavy metal t-shirts at school all the time. I was finishing High School and at school, I met a girl (I don't recall her name, sorry) who said 'hey, do you know this band, it's called Stratovarius and they have this song which I love so much, check it out'. So she handed her earphones to me and added 'I love this song so much that I've recorded the entire tape just with it'.

Yes, she had recorded a tape of 60 minutes just with this song, you've got to remember that we didn't have mp3 players at that time. The thing the struck me the most when I listened to it was the crystal clear production. The song recording was perfect, all the instruments were impeccably recorded. The second thing was the melody, it was REALLY beautiful, remarkable indeed.

I didn't pay much attention to it, I said something like "ow good stuff" but soon I completely forgot about the song and band. Around one year later, on a weekend, I was at home surfing on the Internet when I don't know why I recalled this band. We didn't have a broadband connection yet, just the dial-up modems and God, it was slow. If you were persistent enough you could manage to download one song, but you had to be VERY determined to download it. It wasn't an easy task for sure. So I remembered the name. I didn't remember the song name, however. I started searching through the lyrics sites hoping to find a clue about the song I have listened one year before. After some trial and error, I finally found it! Its name was 'Forever' (actually I'm playing it as I write this post, I'll leave it at the end of the post so you can check it too).

The next day, in the afternoon after school time, I went to Arco da Velha. This place was a rental store where you could rent albums and stuff related to music. I got there and asked the clerk if he had something of this band, with this strange name. He said he had, and showed me the albums he got. I picked the one that had the song I wanted to listen to. The album's name is Episode. I went right away to my home. I took the bus and in no time I was at home listening to that beautiful ballad. God, it was superb. It was worth all the hard work to find it!

After I listened to it a couple of times I decided to check the other songs out, I had a lot of free time after all. I started from the beginning, the first song: Father Time. And the ride that would last many years in my life had just started...

It was something completely different from everything I have already heard. It was fast, very fast. I was not used to that kind of drum playing. It was powerful. And the melody, I just could absorb what was that melody. I kind of liked it, but loved the chorus. Again, it was fast but somehow melodic...almost operatic, I don't know I couldn't define it. Ok, let's go to the second song of the album: 'Will The Sunrise Again?'. Same thing. Fast, powerful, melodic. I dug it. The only thing that bothered me was the voice, I wasn't used to that kind of vocal, a very high pitched vocal, mainly in the fast songs. In the slow-paced songs, the singer's voice was something beautiful. It was just a matter of time until I get used to it and started to love it to death.

Almost all the songs of that album were perfect, wonderfully executed in all the aspects. Later I got the lyrics and oh my, the subjects of the lyrics were very emotional, personal to an extent I had never seen before. They were like poems for me, I fell in love instantly. I wasn't used to those lyrics content when I was listening Green Day or Rancid.

The Episode booklet. Here you can check the band members.

I can't stress enough how this band and album changed my music views. The Episode album was responsible for a drastic change in my music taste. It opened the door to many other bands that I would come to know land love as Nightwish, Sonata Arctica, and Rhapsody. I'm very grateful for that.

Later I finally bought this and many other Stratovarius' albums like Destiny, Visions, Visions of Europe, Infinity, Elements Pt. I&II. Around the year 2000, I ended up going to a show in Curitiba-PR. This was like a dream come true for me. I didn't get autographs from the band members but I was able to watch them live, and this was enough for me.

The band line-up suffered drastic changes in the recent years, Timo Tolkki who was the main composer and guitar player left the band and this made the band change somehow, I can't say if this change was for the better or worse.

I keep listening to Stratovarius albums now and then, I don't enjoy their songs as I used to, something changed, but my respect for those guys is still the same from the older days. As I mentioned before, I'll leave here the song Forever. The song that started all this journey.

Cheers.