SWALLOW THE SUN: Moonflowers (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

When "When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light" (2019) was unveiled, we wondered if Juha Raivio and Swallow The Sun would be able to continue on the path taken by this blindingly beautiful and heartbreakingly painful opus. Yet, when the guitarist and frontman of the Finnish doom-death outfit declares that he hates his new album because of "what it means to him personally and where it takes him," it seems that the deep pain that had led to the composition of the 2019 masterpiece has not been assuaged. It must be said that the health crisis that prevented the band from touring by confining its members to their homes did not help the guitarist to change his mind.

"Moonflowers", new opus and second discographic release of the year after the live "20 Years Of Gloom, Beauty And Despair", thus digs the furrow of sorrow started in 2019. Mikko Kotomäki still uses mostly clear vocals thanks to which he transmits a melancholy balanced on the edge of an abyss of despair where some heartbreaking growls of anger and suffering precipitate us ('Woven Into Sorrow'). It is moreover astonishing that in the middle of such an ocean of pain, Swallow The Sun succeeds in the feat of offering choruses which are catchy in their kind ('Enemy', 'The Void'), frail skiffs to which the listener clings to not sink in tormented and dark depths.

In the middle of this bewitching beauty and frozen in the ice, linearity is never the order of the day. Beyond the angry protrusions translated by the growls, some pale glimmers of hope appear, as on 'All Hallow's Grieve' which sees Cammie Gilbert (Oceans Of Slumber, Ayreon) sharing the vocals with Mikko to extend a fragile bridge between the worlds of the dead and the living, a moving dialogue with the loved one disappeared. Gloomy and soothing at the same time, 'The Void' floats weightlessly in the void that it translates with an ethereal atmosphere sometimes reminding Paradise Lost. As for 'The Fight Of Your Life', it rests on some passages with an acoustic delicacy worthy of Katatonia before a luminous solo letting guess a being who gets up to continue his way between hope and anger, feeling also translated by the black metal passages of 'This House Has No Name' with some blast-beat and screamed vocals.

Without sinking into repetition, "Moonflowers" prolongs the ordeal of its author while sharing a pain that reinforces its humanity. Indeed, if suffering is a feeling that sometimes allows one to feel alive, it translates here the journey of the one who goes through it as well as the sensitivity of the one who receives it. As melancholic as lacerated with a fragile hope, hesitating to sink into anger or to calm down by accepting the painful reality, this album is a path that is worth discovering. - Official website

SWALLOW THE SUN

MOONFLOWERS

CENTURY MEDIA RECORDS

DOOM