The last time I bought a computer, in late 1993, I opted to save money by getting only the components for which I had identifiable needs. I got what was then the fastest available processor, as much RAM as I thought I would actually use, a decent (but not extravagant) monitor, and precious little else. That computer lasted five years in my house, and has since moved on to a pastoral retirement at my parents' disconcertingly well-populated Home for Our Children's Outdated Technology. Five years is an enviable tour of duty, and speaks in favor of just-enough as a buying policy, but it was too easy to forget, there in my last days with the old machine, all the good times, and too easy to focus on its wheezy, encroaching senility. So last winter, when I bought this new one (my third, fourth or fifth, depending on whether you count the PCjr with which I got through college (probably), and the TI-99/4A on which I learned to write incomprehensible video games (probably not)), I sprung for any enhancement to which I couldn't formulate a moral objection. The machine was still state-of-the-art as much as a month after I got it, but by now, seven months later, the only part of it that retains any particular novelty is the lovely flat-panel monitor, which is less a matter of technical foresight on my part than lingering popular ignorance about how cheap they've gotten. All the same, the machine is bigger and faster than any of the three computers on my desk at work, and I'm pretty sure that the upper half of the memory chips haven't felt the touch of a spark since assembly. The tasks I give it are far below its capacities in concept, and only the monumental inefficiency of the software I use for routine work makes them any more challenging in execution. Most of the time the machine just sits there, patiently waiting for ten minutes to have gone by, so it can indulge itself in the momentary amusement of checking again to see if anybody has written me to complain that the Ben Folds song I said was in 3/4 is really just in swing eighths. Computers are either grandly stoic or extremely lazy, and don't tend to gripe about under-utilization, but I felt guilty that I didn't have any chores worthy of the device's continuous attention. All those circuits, idling, and no data to feed them. I did write a little prime-number finder, but absent a coherent rationale for what I was going to do with several million prime numbers, asking the machine to take on their generation as a life-work seemed pretty egregiously patronizing.

Angra, a sticker on one of these records helpfully contends, is South America's premier metal band. I'm sure there are lots of other metal bands on the continent, and perhaps several with their own designs on "premier", but the only other one I'm familiar with is Sepultura, who I don't particularly like, so the title seems reasonable enough, however insignificant. Angels Cry originally came out in 1994, and why we had to wait until this year for a domestic issue I can't imagine, as the band sings in clear and generally unaccented English, and most of this record sounds like the album Queensrÿche might have made after Empire if they'd stuck more closely to their progressive principles, modulating them towards accessibility only by incorporating a few traces of Gamma Ray's histrionic glossiness and fondness for quasi-classical excess (results, probably, of Angra having recorded this album at Kai Hansen's studio in Hamburg, with Hansen, Schlächter and Gamma Ray drummer Thomas Nack all dropping by for cameos). At seventeen I would have preferred Gamma Ray's florid, irrepressible silliness, and at thirty-two I can still put myself into a para-teenage fugue-state and mostly reconstruct my old naïve receptivity to heavy metal with the courage to live out its stereotypes, but it gets more difficult every year. Angra's version of heavy metal, more literate and sophisticated than the Gamma Ray-Iron Maiden axis, still uses too many of metal's tropes (churning rhythm guitar, rococo solo runs, battering drums, vocals leaping from growl to shriek, etc.) to sway anti-metal audiences, but the songwriting is supple, the performances emotive without being overblown, and if the lyrics don't accomplish that much more than Gamma Ray's, at least they appear to get this far without straining as hard. The brief symphonic intro, "Unfinished Allegro", seems to regard Pärt, Beethoven and Swan Lake as interchangeable, which won't win Angra any conservatory residencies, but as one-minute excursions into neo-classical composition by heavy metal bands go, I think it's among the more convincing. Twittering showoff-songbird keyboards enrich the galloping "Carry On", and help the breakneck guitar solos feel like parts of the song's development instead of gratuitous interjections. "Time" is hardly the first metal song to jump from acoustic balladry to martial stomp in the middle, and both the song's dynamics and some of its guitars remind me of Queensrÿche's "Walk in the Shadows", but Angra veer towards compassionate anthem where Queensrÿche turned sinister, and I think they do a commendable job of channeling aggression into the song instead of letting it take over. "Angels Cry" sprints without flailing, "Stand Away" conjures strings and choirs, and the epic, spellbinding "Never Understand" invokes a spiraling folk melody around which Andre Matos winds a surprisingly graceful lead vocal. "Streets of Tomorrow" is menacing and inexorable, and "Evil Warning" sounds a bit like an excerpt from the heavy-metal remake of Fiddler on the Roof, but "Lasting Child", the conclusion (not counting the alternate versions of "Evil Warning", "Angels Cry" and "Carry On" included as bonus tracks), builds on muted piano as if the other instruments are drawn involuntarily to its presence.

The follow-up, Holy Land, released at home in 1996 but also just trucked up here in quantity by Century Media, finds common borders with even more styles. The intro this time, "Crossing", is a Palestrina motet over natural ambience. "Nothing to Say" is relatively conventional metal, but "Silence and Distance" moves from a legato opening that could almost fit on the Titanic soundtrack to a spiky stomp closer to echolyn or Magellan. The ten-and-a-half-minute centerpiece, "Carolina IV", recruits flute, viola and crashing Latin and orchestral percussion. "Holy Land" weaves in acoustic bass and some Japanese instrument samples, and although the metal crescendos do arrive, the lattice frames around them are unapologetically gossamer, and the coda is a pan-ethnic groove that wouldn't sound too miscast on a Juluka record. "The Shaman" is macabre and evasive, with a long field-recording in the middle of it, but the languid "Make Believe" opens with piano, acoustic guitar, organ whir and a rustling snare, and never wholly sheds their jazzy composure. "Z.I.T.O." returns to melodic speed-metal and prog-rock architecture, but "Deep Blue" has a minute of hymn at the beginning and a liturgical choir in the middle, and the finale, "Lullaby for Lucifer", Matos accompanied only by acoustic guitar and ocean noises, is actually what it says it is, a bedtime song to console a fragile, insecure, powerless Evil.

Rather than continuing the band's expansion, though, 1998's Fireworks, recorded in London with veteran metal producer Chris Tsangarides, opts to reconsolidate their energy, and while there are still scattered quiet moments (a tambourine rustling behind the Fripp-ish guitar cycles at the beginning of "Petrified Eyes", sighing strings and eerie synth-chimes in the middle of "Paradise", some bongos and mock-sitar laced through "Gentle Change"), there's not much genre crossover, and little invention of any sort, the vast majority of the record grinding away at a comparatively blunt variant of half-epic thrash. I heard this one first, and was excited enough by it to rush back out and buy the other two records, but now that I've heard them all, this one no longer seems as charming. It's as if the trilogy has been told out of order: Fireworks sounds to me like the most primitive and unformed of the three records, by far, less the culmination of the other two than their prehistory. I don't think the studio relocation and change of producer for this album are coincidental; Angra's musical field of vision appears to have narrowed once they left Gamma Ray's sphere of influence. Ironic, I might have said, but maybe I underestimate.

Leaping almost halfway around the globe, on the theory that all places far from here are fundamentally alike, we find Finnish ex-crypto-metalists Amorphis, who are undergoing a weird bipolar metamorphosis of their own. On one hand, this is the first album for which they've written lyrics from scratch, rather than adapting them from Finnish mythology, and the first one on which guttural founding vocalist Tohi Koivusaari is credited only with rhythm guitar (and although it turns out that he does croak most of "Greed", his absence from the other songs is more notable). On the other hand, Tuonela is the Finnish underworld, and the original lyrics here are relentlessly bleak, even measured against the grim fables adapted for Tales From the Thousand Lakes and Elegy. And although Santeri Kallio fills in, in a few places, for departed keyboardist Kim Rantala, Kallio isn't credited as a band member, and his contributions are correspondingly minor. Sakari Kukko plays flute on one song, and sax on two others, but otherwise the album is just guitars, bass, drums and voice. I'm starting to believe that reversion to hard rock is the natural decay-pattern of a metal band. Vocals shift into the mid-range, the kick drums get thinned out, the guitars start going through one cycle per measure instead of twelve, and before you know it you sound like Aerosmith. Amorphis are only just starting to show symptoms, and a few songs, like the sparkling, moaning "The Way", the sitar-lined rant "Greed", the ominous "Divinity", and the slow, roaring "Summer's End" seem essentially unscathed, but the Hammond on "Morning Star" could be Deep Purple, "Tuonela" falls somewhere between Black Sabbath and Alice in Chains, "Withered"'s guitars flirt with funk and "Rusty Moon" reminds me of Jethro Tull. As with Power Plant, all but two of these songs are based on the primitive equation of night with evil and day with good. In the centuries since the Kalevala, though, I think the balance has slowly reversed itself. We have floodlit the world, so it wouldn't scare us any more, and certainly many truths are phototropic, but the nimble truths, the ones resourceful enough to elude us, have retreated into the few remaining pockets of darkness, including the one straight up. Days are too well understood, too constrained, bleached too pale for spells. We peer out at the stars, and into caves and atoms and each other's eyes, in search of dark territory still malleable, still magic, not yet so micro-determined that the big questions have become unaskable.