Genre : Melodic Death Doom Hybrid with Atmospheric Black and mild Ambient tendencies
Label : Spinefarm, Svart Records
Origin : Finland
Rating : 9.0 / 10
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The Emerald Forest and the Blackbird LP from Finland's Swallow the Sun is a delivery with such pronounced ambitions as you ever dare to witness without skepticism invading your features in the process. The release simultaneously weighs in as a full blown sonic fairy tale with all its audio capacities to efficiently caress and feed the soul, yet the whole narrative content is far from the everyday average perspective of the idealist, and, as result of this, the character of the music oftentimes gets taken through more aggressive warfare than the most tame sections of the release are consisting of. These detours are numerous, their persistence is commanding, and their occurrence especially is frequent at the beginning section of the declaration, then a pacing flows into a narrative field with more interest and fondness exhibited towards the calmer register. Be wary and/or happy, as : the spectrum of the revealed moods and musical behaviors indeed are unusually wide, and the release has ample time to make thorough use of those with its gargantuan length of 66 minutes. Guys, let's talk about the music.
Emerald Forest and the Blackbird, as an intact and complete delivery, shows the character of a masterfully produced mid-tempo fairy tale package with sections of increased intensity embedded into it to offer variation. These intense sections are not seeking to rival the hilarious comic book heft and aggression of fellow countrymen Mors Subita, in fact, they most often dress into musical patterns that dials in the percepts of intense atmospheric black metal, performed though with instruments of melodic death, all in the spirit of the super-polished sound of recent times. (Like time would give a fuck if it is recent or not.)
As hinted previously, these thorough intermissions of more intense character are "but" - logically - intermissions in the true soul of the contribution, that which is an intriguing-, natural-sounding blend between doom metal and atmospheric quasi-black ambient. The disc takes the fortunate liberty of going supermild during these segments, but it never falls to the other side of the horse, either. It is mellow, yet briskly produced delicacy-music with a sound-, yet assuaging mid-tempo character, primarily reliant on a guitar-centered tone that keeps a gracious and stone-cold sober focus on the flow of the dangerous fairy tale itself.
The record is robust, and, as mentioned, marathonian in nature. The acumen to draw a fabric of flamboyant variation all the way through this length, does not prove to be sufficient in my opinion, which prevents this LP under this roof to score above the 9.0 mark. Emerald Forest and the Blackbird is a flawless piece of art when it is riding on its very own peak moments, and it is heartwrenching to see how it subjects itself to radical suicide attempts on your helpless watch, situated behind a bullet proof glass on numerous occasions. I will give you only one example of such behavior, because my intent to attempt to degrade your initial percepts of this record is sub-mininal. What is up with the spoken words on this release? They suck purple donkey dicks, and the narrator does not sound menacing or anything like that. He sounds like he needs to clear his throat and re-record the fucking sequence to reveal the silly little thing called "performance" as opposed to revealing the silly little thing called "throat disease".
Do not let yourself be put off of this release, no matter what consensus tries to persuade you of. This particular review seeks to assure you that the content of the disc is top of the heat, and its only significant fault is its tendency to miss out on the spot it better to stop at than to fade away after. As such, Emerald Forest and the Blackbird has all the charms and charisma of a young bardess, and the only shortcoming is that the bardess relentlessly gives to you everything she has, then she gives it again and again and again until she gave you absolutely everything, and now she has no dignity left to keep. Sometimes less sound and more silence is more eloquent.
Rating : 9.0 / 10
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