lukretion Green Carnation’s 2000 debut Journey to the End of the Night was a difficult affair: a dark, hardly penetrable album, shrouded in pain and desperation, that only occasionally opened up to reveal the genius of Tchort’s musical ambition. Light of Day, Day of Darkness is where Tchort’s art finds its full expression, resulting in a masterpiece of dark progressive metal that any fan of cerebral, ambitious music should listen to at least once in their lifetime.

When you put this record in your CD player for this first time, two things jump at you: 1) the album duration is just above 60 minutes and 2) the album contains only one song. Yes, that’s right: Light of Day, Day of Darkness consists of one, 60-minute long song. Some of you will just write this off as pretentious crap – and there’s no denying that pretentious is a word not unheard of in the realms of progressive rock/metal. But Light of Day, Day of Darkness is the real deal. It’s where wild ideas and ambitions somehow, and miraculously, are pulled off.

For the occasion, Tchort gathered together a whole new set of musicians compared to the debut album: Anders Kobro (In The Woods…) on drums, Stein Roger Sordal on bass, Bjørn Harstad (also In The Woods…) on guitars and Kjetil Nordhus (Trail of Tears, then Tristania) on vocals, with Tchort himself also playing guitars. The list of guest musicians is also long, and includes vocalists Synne "Soprana" Larsen and Jan Kenneth Transeth (both In The Woods…), pianist Bernt Moen, saxophonist Arvid Thorsen, and producer Endre Kirkesola who played sitar, keyboards, strings and Hammond organ on the album. As it should be clear from the list of names and instruments, there is a lot of talent and colour on this record, with a myriad of instruments and sounds meticulously interwoven to realize Tchort’s vision.

The 60 minutes of the album can be roughly divided into two sections. The first 30 minutes develop around a slow-winding tempo and a repetitive, melancholic guitar riff that firmly root the song in gothic/doom territory. Kjetil Nordhus’ crooning vocals add a dramatic outlook to the music, with a beautiful, recurring melody that gives continuity to the song and creates a mellow, reflective mood, further heightened by interspersed clean guitar arpeggios and languid keyboard parts. The second part of the album is more experimental and progressive. It contains a long section with saxophone and female vocalizations, a children’s choir, some impassioned male vocals that reminds me of experimental band Manes, before the song ends in a gorgeous landscape of electronic sound effects with vocoder-filtered vocals.

Light of Day, Day of Darkness is an immersive listen. Although the monumental nature of this musical piece requires time and patience to be fully appreciated in all its nuances and details, strangely it also works well at an epidermal, instinctive level, as the gorgeous doomy riff and vocal melody that open the song return over and over throughout the composition, lulling the listener for its entire 60 minutes. The sheer ambition of this musical project is astonishing. It is even more impressive that Tchort managed to pull it off, creating an album that is filled with brilliant ideas, great performances and that works at multiple levels. I cannot say this of many records out there so if you are a fan of ambitious progressive music this is a “buy or die” kind of album.

Sinkadotentree While the debut was a very dark and depressing album, this the follow-up at least has lots of light in it. The subject matter is still about Tchort losing his daughter but it's shared through the "joy, inspiration and meaning" that his son has brought into his life. And so the music here is dedicated to his new son. Lots of beautiful pictures in the thick liner notes as well. Tchort refers to this recording as his musical legacy. One long 60 minute piece where Tchort can tell us about his feeling without being interupted. The three IN THE WOODS... members who were on the debut aren't here this time but Tchort does dedicate the lyrics to the Botteri brothers. The album starts with atmosphere and we can hear a child making sounds. Some killer stuff throughout the 60 minutes then the recording ends with the sound of a music box. Fantastic lyrics too. In my opinion this is a masterpiece just like the debut but man it has a completely different mood to it.

renkls Not the greatest single song/track album ever made, but close enough to warrant a lot of consideration for those with broadening prog tastes and enough time on their hands to listen to an hour long piece of progressive metal of a pretty refined kind.

First things first, this would be a brilliant 50 minute song. Such as it is, there's quite a bit of gristle that could be shaved off some segments, and nothing of huge value would be lost. The style of music this album contains bridges progressive metal, doom metal and prog rock. It's a very busy album, with apparently over 600 instruments used in the recording process, a children's choir even. The lyrics are melancholy and somewhat dry throughout, though touchingly ambiguous and still interesting.

Green Carnation made an interesting album with Light of Day, and considering their doom metal roots on their first full length, took an adventurous path with it. Since this album they've gone onto full acoustic records also, so they've got no shortage of dexterity.

Overall, it's not quite a masterpiece, but it is a suitably bombastic and epic offering, and well worth checking out for any adventurous metal fan with an hour of time to spare.

Warthur Tchort's stab at the old Thick as a Brick album format delivers some pretty but rather forgettable progressive metal combined with some decidedly nonstandard and rather variable lyrics. To be honest, I think the album veers into cheesiness a little often for its own good - the female vocals partway through the composition, as others have noted, require the singer to sing higher than she's really able to handle, whilst the use of a children's choir just pushes the saccharine undercurrents of the album to the forefront. I understand that the piece is Tchort's meditation on the death of his daughter and birth of his son, and whilst it's laudable that he'd use such personal material as fodder for the album, on the whole I don't think it succeeds as material for general enjoyment.

bonnek This is the kind of album that suspiciously sounds as if it was written for me. Green Carnation has the majestic melodious doom metal sound of The Gathering's Mandylion mixed with the quiet and spacey atmosphere from Anathema's Judgement. Both bands with a strong Pink Floyd flavor in the sound, and so does Green Carnation. Unfortunately, there are a couple of things that reduce the enjoyment.

The album brings one continuous 60 minute piece of music and the band has been very successful at making it flow very smoothly and spontaneously. There are some parts where the music plods along a bit but I'm a doom metal enthusiast so that's no issue for me, I'm used to worse plodding then this!

The music is solid throughout but lacks true highpoints, moments of splendor, crescendos that build up a tension and release it with a devastating blow. Everything stays too much at a same volume, pace and intensity. There's no 'wow'-moment at any point. Only the guitar solo around 42 minutes gives a try. Another thing that bothers is that the chorus is repeated too much in the first half. The vocals are warm and melodic but are totally lacking in dynamics as well.

There's one more issue with this album and it's the female vocals halfway in. Who gave this poor woman the idea to sing higher then she possibly could? She's miles off her high notes. The effect is very amateur and grating at best. It's probably an attempt to sound like Dead Can Dance but it's a sad failure. This vocalist is no Lisa Gerrard and certainly no Diamanda Galas, who would have ripped this section apart! Besides, the melodies are very unremarkable. Worst of all, this whole album is mastered as one track so you can't even skip this part. Ripping to mp3 and cutting it up seems to be the only solution to avoid this.

Light Of Day might be an attractive album to try modern metal because it has no gruff vocals, but it is misses the dynamics and imagination to reach true greatness. It could have been 4 stars, but the hysterical female vocals in the middle easily shatter some stars to bits.