Swallow the Sun - When a Shadow Is Forced into the Light

Swallow the Sun have been nourishing the ecosystem of death/doom with the nutrition that the genre has needed since Anathema and Katatonia moved on the different musical ventures, providing the kind of heavy melancholy in line with albums like Katatonia’s Brave Murder Day or Viva Emptiness, occasionally dipping into the more  down-tuned side death/doom.
This album certainly leans more heavily on the serenely melancholic than on heaviness. Mostly drifting through ambient sections of guitar echoes and smooth, gentle percussion, the sections of heaviness that do arrive are either so short and underdeveloped when they are suddenly introduced, or they are so minimal and gradually worked up to that the payoff just isn’t worth the time. I do enjoy death/doom and melancholic ambient music, but this album really feels like such an underwritten and unbalanced integration of the two.
The bulk of the seven-minute opening title track is essentially just introductory mood-setting until the down-tuned guitar groove hits, providing only a temporary burst of energy that I kept hoping would foreshadow some truly powerful performances to come, but alas…. The song “Firelights” is essentially a shorter version of the same format, with but a brief section of black metal screams and double bass rising and crashing like one single wave in an otherwise dead sea, and the closing song, “Never Left”, is similarly drone-y and builds such a hazy ambiance to that of the intro track, albeit a little bit shorter, that I just felt every time I listened to it that I had just walked very slowly in a very small circle of space and come back to where I started with this album.
It’s strange, while I definitely don’t like sitting through the hour-long aura of this album, there are quite a few moments I do enjoy individually. I do like the more balanced heaviness of songs like the vocally melodic “Stone Wings”, and the growl-heavy “Clouds on Your Side”. I also liked the build-ups and ebbs-and-flows between ambient and sludgy sections in “Here on the Black Earth”.
It has taken me a lot of energy just to conjure something to say about this album, which is strange, because there is definitely a sonic aesthetic this album cultivates, but it’s both so ambient and nondescript that every time I’ve listened to the whole thing, it feels like I either didn’t listen to anything all that spectacular or like I didn’t even listen to anything at all. And I have spent a lot of time listening to it trying so hard to see the merit and have it click. It’s not a matter of not understanding the appeal. I get the dynamic between the musical elements the band is blending into their style on the album, and it’s not the style that renders this album so difficult to stay alert to, it’s the lack of interesting ideas being poured into the style here that has made me so uneager and reluctant to return to this album every time I do, which in itself has become the clearest sign of what this album is in my eyes.
Spa metal/10

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