“When great music flows from a band like water, it cranks up expectation to burning point. Your nerves tingle at the mere mention of a new official video. And your palms sweat a little as the band’s shiny new promo drops like manna into your outstretched, grabby hands. With so many full-bodied offerings under their belt, can Omnium Gatherum make a clean sweep giving themselves a mighty four out of four winning streak?” Grey is the new black.
“As far as metal goes, Finland is renowned for producing some of the most morose, depressing bands to ever drag themselves out of bed and into a recording studio (Children of Bodom notwithstanding). Among their ranks is the heavy and atmospheric Hanging Garden.” Sad boys are often sad.
“It’s old news to loyal readers that I really took to the last Omnium Gatherum opus (as did AMG himself). Though I appreciated their prior album The Redshift a lot, I certainly wasn’t expecting the monumental slab of Finnish melo-death mixed with mega-melodic Euro-power metal that was New World Shadows. It’s one of those rare albums that has the perfect mix of atmosphere, melody, hooks and power, and it was my album of the year in 2011. I was pretty sure Omnium Gatherum would be unable to equal or top it, and when Beyond appeared in my promo bin, it was just of question of how close they could could get to the ridiculous quality of NWS.” So, how close DOES this get to New World Shadows? Steel Druhm busts out his slide rule and does some scientific measurements, so you don’t have to.
As I write this, it’s 15 degrees Celsius outside. The sun rises, but does not provide any warmth. Everything in my world is covered in a thin layer of ice, and things seem to be moving very slowly. In other words: it’s cold as shit out here. This is the perfect weather for some gloomy, atmospheric, slow-ass metal. And it just so happens that I have At Every Door, the new album by Finnish sextet Hanging Garden.
Finland’s penchant for downy frowny metal is pretty well known. Sporting doom, melodeath and atmospheric black metal acts the like of Swallow the Sun, Insomnium and October Falls and being known for long, dark, vodka-soaked, winters speckled with knife fights and rumors of sunlight somewhere south, it’s actually a surprise that Finland hasn’t produced a lot of more music consisting of both downies and frownies. Indeed, post-metallers The Chant are really the first in their particular idiom. What is their particular idiom, you ask? Well, you know, the kind of music you write when the sun hasn’t risen for a three months: depressive post-rock.
So I’ve been digging through un-opened promos from this year that simply got missed due to scheduling or whatever and man, I’ve really hit the fucking jackpot with this one. I feel terrible that I missed it because it’s awesome. Lately, I’ve had a lot of issues with black metal as a whole. I am not alone in this. Even the ultimately reliable and excellent Taake kind of disappointed me this year. I’m not a post-black metal kind of guy and yet, for the life of me, I can’t find any black metal bands that really fucking rule these days. It’s like the scene just up and left the area I was inhabiting
Heavy metal was once the most popular music in the world. Sure, it was glam rock, but bands that were genuinely cool were doing really well even if they weren’t getting radio play. Think about the success of Metallica pre-black album, or Iron Maiden selling out the Long Beach Arena 4 nights running on the tour for Powerslave. The music was technical, but it was still accessible and the mass appeal was still synonymous with good bands. But since the 1980s the quality of pop music has declined dramatically, and popular rock with it. We have now landed in a bizarro world, where bad, fundamentally not very catchy or interesting bands that lack all content are popular, and where innovators and interesting bands have trouble getting any recognition. But there’s an even more terrible place, and that’s the ill-advised attempts of people to try to blend these two things. No good can come of this.
There was a time when melodic death metal was every breath I took. While it’s been a long time since that was the case, I certainly can say that I spent the late 90s and early 00s listening to my fair share of melodic Swedish death metal and loving it. But since then melodic death metal has kinda fallen off a cliff. This is partially due to the dawning of metalcore and the co-opting of Swedish thrash and death metal by hardcore kids, but I think it’s mainly because just like every scene after a while you start growing tired of the sound. Every new album that gets released gets a “Yeah, well, I’ve heard this before.” While there have been some notable melodic death metal records in the last couple of years, Barren Earth and Be’lakor come to mind, only the former has really stuck out as truly remarkable. That is until I checked out New World Shadows from Omnium Gatherum.
