Swallow The Sun
New Moon
Spinefarm Records
09 November 2009
by Hugh Platt
I guess you could say that Swallow The Sun have bad timing. Putting out their new album just a week after Katatonia dropped Night Is The New Day – an album that surely is going to be bothering many critics’ “Best of ’09″ lists – meant that New Moon seems destined to be overlooked.
It was be a tragedy if it was overlooked, because compared to a lot of the half-baked hardcore and snooze-inducing neo-prog that fogged up the release schedule for much of this year, Swallow The Sun’s fourth album of melodic death-doom is an almost welcome slice of miserablism. Moreso than the three previous albums from the Finnish sextet, it manages to project a sweeping sense of epicness, while still remaining insular inwardly hostile.
Markus Jämsen and Juha Raivio’s guitars are responsible for as much of the record’s character as Mikko Kotamäki’s dry vocals rasps. It might lack the choppier, beefier riffs of fellow Finns Insomnium’s recent opus, but instead has a driving, weather-beaten inevitability about the textures the band employs.‘Falling World’ in particular sounds like the band should be playing it atop some rocky outcrop overlooking some desolute stretch of nordic ocean, all the while with a storm whipping ineffectually about them.
In fact, to bring up Insomnium as a comparison is flawed from the off; New Moon is as much about the moments where it is at its most delicate, like the gentle echoing first few minutes of ‘Sleepless Swans’, as it is the apocalyptic doom-thunder that album closer, ‘Weight of the Dead’, weighs in with from the off.
In many ways New Moon is closer to 2007’s Hope, than the stopgap Plague of Butterflies EP the band put out last year. Aleksi Munter’s keyboards have returned to providing carefully positioned background atmosphere, as opposed to the manner they obtusely stuck out on the EP. In effec this makes Swallow The Sun seem a more settled, more authorative band; they no longer feel the need to highlight their use of keyboards, and are happy to let them rest towards the back of the mix until they’re needed.
Watch some slightly wonky footage of Swallow The Sun playing live
With “frostbitten” irrevocably claimed by Immortal as far as musical adjectives go, perhaps the best way to describe New Moon is “wintry”. Everything about this record makes you want to pull your coat around you just that little bit tighter – even when you’re sitting snug inside a house and not even wearing a bloody coat. With the nights getting longer, the winds getting shriller and temperatures getting chillier, maybe Swallow The Sun’s timing isn’t actually so bad after all.
4.5/6
Sounds like: Paradise Lost, Katatonia, being lost in the woods at night
Top tracks: These Woods Breathe Evil, Falling World, Weight Of The Dead
Swallow The Sun – New Moon tracklisting
These Woods Breathe Evil
Falling World
Sleepless Swans
And Heavens Cried Blood
Lights on the Lake (Horror pt. III)
New Moon
Servant of Sorrow
Weight of the Dead