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By RYAN MAVITY
I thought Funeral was a depressing band, but they have nothing on Finland’s Swallow the Sun. The title of the album, Hope, is perhaps apropos; there seems to be very little of it in the world of Swallow the Sun. The problem is this band left me doomed out. Hope is an exhausting experience, and I’m not sure whether the claustrophobic vibes I got from it were good or bad.
The album starts with the title track, and it’s probably Hope’s strongest song. It’s a solid enough start, but it isn’t long before the album becomes suffocating. All you need to hear is track names like “These Hours of Despair,” “The Justice of Suffering,” “No Light, No Hope” and “Doomed to Walk the Earth” to know what the record’s themes are.
Now, I have no problem with doom and gloom. I just want the band to make the despair invigorating in some way. Part of what made me like Daylight Dies’ Dismantling Devotion so much is that that record brought some catharsis and invention to the music. It didn’t beat me over the head with its sadness. Hope aspires to that but doesn’t succeed because it lacks that musical depth. Once you get past the first couple of tracks, the album becomes one-dimensional. It quickly becomes a relentless assault that had me wanting to put on my Beatles and The Who records on just to enjoy myself with an album again.
Note that I do not object to the album’s intentions, merely the effect it had on me. I wish the album had been more enjoyable on a musical level. Unlike the Daylight Dies record, there are no acoustic guitars, alternating clean vocals or progressive movements to keep me interested. Hope just goes on and on and on, and the band’s thumpings get pretty tiresome after a while. It gives us doom and gloom but doesn’t probe any further or give any emotional release.
The fault does not lie with frontman Mikko Kotamaki. He’s got a prototype doom metal voice; it’s nothing less than the sound of Satan himself. He takes the growling vocal style to new extremes. But the band never totally exploits his voice for some of the possibilities it could have. Imagine hearing him above more complex arrangements. Hope is not completely bad. It has that early Sabbath vibe that doom metal was founded on, but it’s a one trick pony whose trick you catch onto pretty fast.
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