As Divine Grace
Lumo

I still remember very well the day this CD fell into my hands. The year was 1997, it was a gray November morning, and senior year of high school wasn't even remotely close to the halfway mark. I was sitting in the back row with my earphones and my trusty player, waiting for the end of the hostilities, hoping for a sudden onset of narcolepsy… but just as I was about to succumb to psycho-physical collapse, my faithful companion rescued me with this LP. Boom!

Back then, for me, gothic-doom was mainly represented by Paradise Lost (who produced those two wonders "Shades of God" and "Icon"), Anathema (authors of the phenomenal "Pentecost III" and "The Silent Enigma"), and my beloved My Dying Bride (who reached the sublime with "Turn Loose the Swans" and "The Angel and the Dark River"), all bands that heavily influenced the European black/death scene at that time. Beyond these milestones, there was little to nothing, also because the sacred trio Cathedral/St. Vitus/Obsessed was increasingly distancing itself, returning to "acid-sabbathian" origins, while Thergothon, Esoteric, and Godsend were heavily stepping on the brake, seeking ever more "sludgy" and gloomy atmospheres.

The real turning point came in 1995 with the release of the eponymous debut by The 3rd and The Mortal (with the legendary Kari Rueslatten on vocals) and the fabulous "Mandylion" by The Gathering (who abandoned growl vocals and featured Anneke Van Giesbergen in their lineup), creating a true revolution in a genre that was reaching saturation. To be fair, the first to experiment in this area were Celestial Season ("Forever Scarlet Passion," 1993), but at the time they were still tied to purely doom/death styles, and with the subsequent "Solar Lovers," they also veered towards more seventies atmospheres.

However, since then, I couldn't listen to anything that truly enthused me, it was as if the injection of vitality given to the scene by the Norwegians and the Dutch had only accelerated an irreversible process… dear 'Lost after "Draconian Times" were sliding towards increasingly rockish atmospheres in search of success in the USA; Anathema was starting to lose themselves in pseudo-Floydian sounds, and the "Dying Bride" was plunging into a depressive whirlpool leading to the genesis of the controversial "Like Gods of the Sun."

When on that fateful day, "Lumo" reached my ears, from the then-unknown As Divine Grace. A triumph of melody, clear rhythmic rides, liquid guitars, and synths spread to the nth degree; all while keeping in mind the lesson of dark-wave and in particular the seminal Fields of the Nephilim, a band to which the present Finnish group (and the entire Scandinavian scene) owes a great deal. The doom sounds, as was already happening in the albums of the Gathering and the Mortal, are almost completely set aside in favor of a less oppressive and more "atmospheric" sound, which surely treasures the melodic lesson offered in those years by Opeth, Decoryah, and Beyond Dawn (a band that, in my opinion, didn't receive the recognition it deserved for what it produced).

Even today, ten years later, I can't find a weak point in this album, undoubtedly one of the few albums from my adolescence that I still preserve and cherish jealously. Eight tracks suspended in time: perfect, clear, crystalline. The voice of Hanna Kalske may not be on the level of the aforementioned Kari and Anneke, but it is tremendously hypnotic even in the rare moments when it (perhaps intentionally) becomes monotone, constantly managing to lead the listener into the silence and peace of snow-covered night forests.

I could mention "Perpetual," with its ethereal and galloping moves, or "In Low Spirits" with its dark-melodic openings, or "Grimstone" and "Gash" where the suffering vocal inserts of bassist Jukka Silanpaa stand out, truly dark and evocative: but not placing the other songs on the same level would, in my opinion, be a crime.

Without a shadow of a doubt, along with Katatonia, one of the most beautiful entities of that period.

"Like winds I dance the leaves away… "