Floor Jansen goes it alone to seek more mainstream acclaim

Paragon is the debut solo album from Nightwish singer Floor Jansen

My Paragon cover art
(Image: © Floor Jansen)

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You get the feeling that despite being the formidable- lunged voice of Finnish symphonic metal titans Nightwish, Dutch belter Floor Jansen has eyes on a move away from their more cultish audience to more mainstream acclaim. 

On the first album under her own name the same strengths that stand out with her alma mater prove her trump cards again. Invincible and Come Full Circle veer too close to 80s-style AOR blandness. 

But far more striking are the numbers when Jansen allows herself the freedom to let rip from a theoretical mountaintop, with some vague sense of a natural disaster unfolding around her, as on the sweeping melodrama of Storm or the thunderous chamber rock of the final track and recent single Fire

Likewise, third single Me Without You works when she really reaches for the high notes as if reaching out for something she's just lost as it shrinks over the horizon.

Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock