Auri – Auri

Auri has three members – Johanna Kurkela, Tuomas Holopainen and Troy Donockley. The last two names are familiar to Nightwish fans – Tuomas being the main composer and keyboard player of Nightwish, and Troy is a longtime collaborator and now full member of Nightwish. Johanna Kurkela is Tuomas’s wife and on this album she provides the vocals.

Not content with writing all the Nightwish albums, and doing a solo album, Tuomas has created this new side-project, Auri. So what is Auri’s music? Well that’s a question that isn’t easy to answer as it doesnt come anywhere fitting into a single genre. There are influences from a range of styles, but they’ve been blended together to form something new and unique. At times it feels like a movie soundtrack, there’s a strong Celtic element (helped by Troy’s choice of instruments), there’s a folk influence, there’s pop, rock and all sorts of stuff in here, so it’s all of these and none of them at the same time.

The lyrics are inspired by the books of Patrick Rothfuss, author of the Kingslayer chronicles, but as always with Tuomas it’s never going to be as simple as telling stories from the books.

You may wonder why when Tuomas works with a talented vocalist like Floor Jansen in Nightwish he’d change things for this side project, but the fact is that while Floor’s voice is fantastic, it’s a strong powerful voice and that just wouldnt work on this album – Johanna’s voice is more delicate and ethereal so suits the music perfectly.

It’s a fantastic album – it’s not got the metal element that we’re used to with Nightwish, but the music will certainly feel familiar to Nightwish fans as many of the elements of the music in this album appear more subtly in the Nightwish sound.

Track listing:

1. The space between
2. I hope your world is kind
3. Skeleton tree
4. Desert flower
5. Night 13
6. See
7. The name of the wind
8. Aphrodite rising
9. Savant
10. Underthing slstice
11. Them that chanterelles

Auri are:

Johanna Kurkela: Voices & viola
Tuomas Holopainen: Keys & backing voices
Troy Donockley: Acoustic and electric guitars, bouzouki, uilleann pipes, low whistles, aerophone, bodhran, keys, voices