AVATARIUM: The Fire I Long For (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Initially presented as one of Leif Edling's side-projects, Avatarium gradually tends to cut the cord with Candlemass, in order to exist by itself. Each new offering sees the legendary bassist's claw fade away to the point where his role is very reduced.

Even though he is officially no longer part of the band, his influence is still significant, not so much for the increasingly rare compositions that he still signs, but for his style, recognizable among a thousand others. All the difficulty resides today in the capacity to make evolve, without distorting it, this very particular identity that Eidling has fixed, that is to say this bewitching alloy between the elegance of a female vocal and the volcanic power of guitars, the whole covered with progressive emanations escaped from the seventies.

Listening to "The Fire I Long For" testifies that the patriarch of the Swedish doom chapel was right to step back and let Avatarium fly on its own wings because it allowed the latter to assert itself in its collective dimension and not only as the fruit of the association between the bassist and the guitarist Marcus Jidell (Evergrey, Royal Hunt...).

This fourth opus sees the Swedish palette being enriched with more psychedelic colours, like the tender 'Lay Me Down' or even stranger and more noisy (the last bars of 'Shake That Demon'). Against all odds, the band may never have sounded so doom, carried by a huge guitar, as illustrated by the overwhelming 'Voices'. But still, soft features, conveyed by the colourful keyboards and crystalline vocals, soften the hardness of these anvils stuck in the magma ('Porcelain Skull').

Emotion is not spurned in an ensemble where Marcus Jidell's soli ('Great Beyond') compete in majesty with the powerfully dramatic voice of Jennie-Ann Smith ('Stars They Above', a skeletal conclusion as beautiful as a sleeping cat). Writing and arrangements are of a very high quality, which is admirably symbolised by the misty 'Epitaph Of Heroes', a long progressive and undeniable G-spot of the album. Meeting between the Rainbow of the Dio era and a female vocal as solemn as inhabited, the band's identity is magnified by these seven minutes heavy and bewitching, dark and tragic.

With "The Fire I Long For", Avatarium asserts itself as a band in its own right, freed from the tutelary presence of Leif Edling, while at the same time being one of the major figures of a doom combining the impetuosity of hard rock with the silky flamboyance of progressive. - Official website

AVATARIUM

THE FIRE I LONG FOR

NUCLEAR BLAST

DOOM