SWALLOW THE SUN — Moonflowers (review)

SWALLOW THE SUN — Moonflowers album cover

Album · 2021 · Doom Metal

4/5 · 2021-12-12
lukretion

Melodic doommasters Swallow the Sun have just released their eight full-length album, Moonflowers, which came out on 19th November 2021 via Century Media. The new album follows what many consider to be the pinnacle of the Finnish band’s career so far, 2019’s When a Shadow Is Forced into the Light, a gorgeous, dark record suspended between doom/gothic metal, prog and post-rock and packed with tremendous emotional intensity due to the dramatic events that inspired its songwriting (the untimely death of Juha Raivio’s partner, Aleah Stanbridge). Written entirely by Raivio and recorded by the same line-up as the previous album (minus keyboard player Jaani Peuhu, who here only provides backing vocals), Moonflowers draws inspiration from the same sorrowful place as Swallow the Sun’s previous LP and it can be considered in many ways its lyrical and musical continuation. There are subtle differences in mood and style, though, which ensures Moonflowers tells its own tale of pain and sorrow and does not just replicate what had already been told by the previous album.

The 8 tracks of Moonflowers tell the intimate and unashamedly personal tale of Raivio’s pain and depression triggered by the loss of Aleah, symbolized by the album’s shocking cover art that Raivio painted with his own blood. The music perfectly captures this dark mood: it is slow, oppressive and full of dramatic contrasts. The songs swing continuously between minimalistic sections dominated by delicate guitar arpeggios and beautiful string arrangements, and violent accelerations with distorted guitars, devastating growls and blast beats. The music feels intentionally unadorned: drums and bass often play very simple patterns, sticking to the beat without too many embellishments. The keyboards are also used sparingly and even the guitar riffs are used in moderation, leaving arpeggios and simple, forlorn leads take the spotlight.

The other main ingredient of the album are the string arrangements played by the Trio N O X, a Finnish group of classical musicians playing violin, viola and cello. The symphonic flair provided by the strings is probably the most distinctive aspect of the album that draws a clear distinction relative to its predecessor. The strings greatly contribute to the dramatic atmosphere of the record and provide a stark contrast with the rest of the electrified instrumentation. With all these elements in place, the album offers a near perfect combination of all the elements that Swallow the Sun have been incorporating into their sound for years now, from the sludgy tempos of doom, to the ferocity of black/death metal, to the romantic atmosphere of gothic metal, to the mellowness of post-rock and the sophistication of progressive metal.

Despite the common lyrical and sonic themes, there is a great deal of variation across the 8 tracks of the album. The record opens and closes with what are the most intense and dramatic pieces of the whole LP. “Moonflowers Bloom in Darkness” is probably the best track here, opening with a sombre, disheartened waltz that suddenly explodes in a stunning blackened chorus where Mikko Kotamäki’s pained vocals paint an all too real image of the “fires of Misery” he sings about. Album closer “This House Has No Home” follows a similar inspiration and reconnects also lyrically with the opener. This is probably the bleakest and most forlorn piece of the record, to the point that it almost hurts to listen to it. “Woven into Sorrow” is another slow-burn piece that follows similar musical coordinates, accentuating the doom/death component of the music. Elsewhere Moonflowers softens its stance and lets the gothic undertones of the music come more to the fore. “Enemy” and “The Void” are the most accessible tracks on the album, with gorgeously catchy vocal lines and a sense of melancholy that brings to mind the best work of Katatonia. “All Hallow’s Grieve” is another beautiful and incredibly melodic gothic piece that represents the emotional peak of the record. The song also stands out for Cammie Gilbert’s (Oceans of Slumber) cameo, her soulful voice playing a perfect counterpoint to Kotamäki’s forlorn crooning. The guitars shine on this track too, from the stunning arpeggio that opens the song to the howling guitar solo that brings it to its climax.

Meanwhile, on “Keep Your Heart Safe from Me” and “The Fight of Your Life” the band experiment with more complex, long-form compositions, alternating acoustic sections with heavier parts (big Opeth vibes here) and playing with subtle atmospheres and mood shifts, rather than relying on melodic accessibility. I’ll be honest – these tracks do not grab me as much as the rest of the album, to the point that I feel the record drags a bit through their combined 14 minutes. This is probably the main weakness of Moonflowers: despite all its splendour, the album does falter in a couple of episodes and its songwriting is not as homogeneously stellar as that on When a Shadow Is Forced into the Light. Strong tracks like “Moonflowers Bloom in Darkness”, “Enemy”, and “All Hallow’s Grieve” are counterbalanced by more inaccessible episodes, like the two songs just mentioned, but even “This House Has No Home” and “Woven into Sorrow” feel bleak and forbidding in comparison.

This unevenness underscores even more what is probably the true essence of this record: Moonflowers is no easy listening material. It’s dark, dense and desperate music, to the point that Juha Raivio himself confessed to find it hard to listen back to these songs after having recorded them. His pain feels raw and real and, as an outside listener, it almost hurts to be its witness. There is a raging fury smoldering underneath the album’s 52 minutes that has all but replaced the sweet romanticism of the material contained on When a Shadow Is Forced into the Light. On that album, the loss of the loved one was tempered by the remembrance of her love, Aleah’s spirit still very much present in every note. That presence is now gone, extinguished, and Moonflowers sings of absence, rather than of loss. The difference is subtle, yet dramatic and crippling. It explains why the music can sometimes feel so difficult, unadorned and barren. Therein probably lie both the greatest virtue and flaw of the album: the thick gloom and rage that transpire from Moonflowers can be intoxicating, but also taxing and emotionally draining for the listener as much as for the man who wrote the music, and while I just couldn’t get enough of When a Shadow Is Forced into the Light, I can only take Moonflowers in small doses, separated in time.

[Originally written for The Metal Observer]