Stortregn – Finitude Review

Reviewer’s note: we never received a promo copy, so I had to wait just like all of you to hear Finitude last Friday. If the fine folks at The Artisan Era are reading, I’m not mad. Just disappointed. I’m also mad.

There’s this episode of Star Trek: Voyager¹ where the ship’s doctor, a sentient hologram who likes to sing, is rendering aid to a member of an extremely technologically advanced and generally arrogant alien race who had somehow never encountered the concept of music. He sings to himself in the course of his work and it blows their fucking minds. They invite him to tour their planet, where he performs opera. They all go bananas. Of course, the aliens were only interested in music for its mathematical properties, and they quickly design their own holograms that can technically outperform the Doctor. This upsets him because he sees them sacrificing the emotion and “soul” of music for cold technicality, so he returns to Voyager. There’s this whole lesson about belonging and blah blah blah. What’s important is this is the danger with tech death in a nutshell. Switzerland’s Stortregn have long fallen on the “technical but soulful” side of the wank line, but a noticeable uptick in tech aspects on their last record had me wondering if that would continue with their sixth full-length Finitude. Turns out, it does.

Stortregn have always been a meloblack band with a tech death heart, but Finitude is a faster, meaner, and more varied beast than ever. The album is tightly wound and asymmetrical, unlike 2021’s Impermanence which counterbalanced the band’s labyrinthine instrumental prowess with nearly cinematic song structures, giving us sweeping epics like “Ghosts of the Past” and “Grand Nexion Abyss.” Many of the band’s signature aesthetics are still intact, from the regal guitar leads to the classical acoustic passages, including a head-turning flamenco break in “Xeno Chaos,” but there’s more emphasis on layered blasts and turn-on-a-dime transitions. There are a few moments of increased nastiness this time, like the gravely bass bridge in “Cold Void” and the gritty opening to “Omega Axiom,” adding a slightly new wrinkle to the band’s sound.

This wouldn’t be a Stortregn album without some absolute face-melters, and this is most definitely a Stortregn album. “A Lost Battle Rages On” soars and struts over blast beats and arpeggios, pauses for a fantastic throwback guitar solo, then a false ending leads into harmonized guitars taking the song to even higher heights. The opening title track is so dense and fast, it takes a good half dozen listens to hear how cohesive the subtle the composition is. On the other end, “The Revelation” might be the best album closer in the band’s catalog, combining the epic sweep of Impermanence with the new, more densely bundled songwriting. It’s basically a series of ascending solos stitched together, and it slays. And if any song could fit seamlessly into their previous album—which was my AOTY, mind you—it’s “Xeno Chaos.” Majestic guitar leads and buoyant baselines carry the thread of the song through the twists and turns of blasts, atmospheric flourishes and that incredible flamenco stretch.

Calling back to our holographic doctor and advanced alien race, it’s with some trepidation I must note the cold creep of technicality is beginning to affect the balance Stortregn always found between intricacy and emotion. There’s always been an immediacy to the melodic style these Swiss lads weave through their chugs and tremolos, but those melodies are tougher to follow this time. There are songs, like “Rise of the Insidious” or “De Inferno Solis,” that have all the right passages to make a killer Stortregn song, but they’re jumbled. More arbitrarily connected than in the past. It’s no wonder that “Xeno Chaos” is my favorite cut from Finitude, as it shares the same commitment to symmetry as my favorite song on Impermanence, “Grand Nexion Abyss.” Both songs cycle through their transitions and surprises but always return to the stately melodies that are established in the intros, proving that here is a song demanding your attention. This “technicality creep” hasn’t done enough to seriously damage the final impact of Finitude, but it’s enough that I have to admit as much as I wanted them to equal or even surpass their last outing, the highs are not as high this time.

I hemmed and hawed a great deal over what to score this. If I wasn’t already a follower of the band, I may have been even more generous. All the things I love about past releases are still here. They’re just slowly succumbing to pure technicality. There are songs here that stand with the very best of what Stortregn have put out, but Finitude falls a bit short of the band’s own potential.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: none | Format Reviewed: Streaming
Label: The Artisan Era
Websites: stortregn.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/stortregn
Releases Worldwide: October 13th, 2023