Insomnium's new album came out the previous Friday, and I had to download it immediately. Just to set things straight - I love, I absolutely love it! The previously released tracks like Ephemeral and Revelation weren't my favourites, so I didn't know what to expect, but in the end I found it an amazing record.
(Have a nice, big cover art because I love this too. Minimal but gorgeous.)
I'm still debating whether I like this more than Across the Dark, because I suspect it's going to grow on me more and more. Insomnium's signature style, that serene melancholia so prevalent in their music is something close to me. Their sound is singular among melodic death metal bands, and because of that I think they may not be appealing to every metal listener, but they are missing out. Not being aggressive-sounding doesn't mean they don't have the technical prowess - for one, this record is masterfully played. The songwriting is up to par with the poetry of the music itself - also, someone who has read my previous writings may know I'm a sucker for clean vocals in melodeath (which many metal fans seem to hate), and on this album, they are perfect.
Melodic death metal is obviously not a happy genre. The band's previous albums, One for Sorrow and Across the Dark, are prime examples of depressing songs. (Although there are a few which have some defiant perseverance in them, such as Across the Dark's Weather the Storm.) While this album retains that sadness, and keeps Insomnium one of the most woeful bands I listen to, there's some contrasting sense of worthiness, of enduring hope in the music and the lyrics as well.
The opening track, The Primeval Dark, doesn't have the ethereal quality that previous intros - Equivalence or Inertia - do, but its more powerful guitars and raw sound set the mood of the album perfectly. The second song, While We Sleep, is one of my favourites. I like the slightly distorted clean vocals, and their contrast with the growling; and the slow outro is magical. In Revelation, the influence of Omnium Gatherum's Marcus Vanhala really shows (I think he wrote this one), with an unmistakable Insomnium atmosphere. Black Heart Rebellion feels a little too long to me, I couldn't really get into it. Lose to Night is one of their more ordinary songs, as in it has an easy, slow melody - but it's still really them, and I really like the chorus. Collapsing Worlds is a more positive song - I'd say thematically it's pretty similar to Weather the Storm, which might be the reason I like it so much, still, it's a slightly more uplifting approach. The River is definitely one of the best songs on the album - daring, different -, this is how you make a long Insomnium song work. It's a little dive back to sadder lyrical themes, but the structure of the song is so compelling, how it starts powerful, then fades into a ballad and picks up again. The album version of Ephemeral, even with a more prominent instrumentalization, is still their most 'radio-friendly' song: a conventional structure, easy riffs, a catchy melody, relatively simple lyrics. I like it though - I don't really have any aversion to more uptempo melodeath songs, and it's understandable why they made it the first single. The last to songs are better in my opinion though: The Promethean Song is unbelievably beautiful, a poem about human existence, so to say.
The last song, Shadows of the Dying Sun is my personal favourite song, and I could analyze it for hours. Even though it's the eponymous song, it's not so much a summary of the album, but an outlook of it. The slow verses and the all-out choruses contrast just as much as the content in the lyrics - a summary of the infinity of the ephemeral human existence, of the greatness and insignificance of our time here, the sensing and the knowing. We are shadows of a dying sun... / ...we are the dust of the stars - as our end and our beginning, the wonder of being made of the universe, and the humility of being so small. We're nothing more than shadows | Flares blazing in a blink of an eye | We're nothing more than shadows | Glimmers of hope against the black sky - how in our small existence we are but dark, and how in our moments of greatness we are light. It's beautiful, pure poetry.
My top 3 picks: While We Sleep; Ephemeral; Shadows of the Dying Sun
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