Katatonia
Brave Murder Day

Katatonia do not play black metal, nor are they Norwegian.

Now that you can all read this review in peace, I too, with a calm heart, am ready to talk about what remains the unsurpassable starting and finishing point for doom/death, a genre in which perhaps the only ones capable of rivaling this great album are Anathema with their The Silent Enigma.

Monolithic riffs, slow, incredibly heavy yet endowed with a wonderful melody, notes that tear at your soul and chord sequences that you'll find yourself waiting for throughout the song, anticipating their arrival from some signal: a riff tossed here and a drum break there, but when their moment comes, they explode as if something inside you finally breaks free and slides away with the music.
One is then led to wonder about the alchemy through which these Swedes manage to keep the listener almost in a state of catalepsy (of catatonia... ohoh), almost under the effect of a drug, one might say... the first time I listened to the 10 minutes of "Brave," I spent a good half of the song with my eyes fixed on the computer screen, motionless... enchanted.

The tapping riff is wonderful with a very slow chord progression, that seems to drag almost wearily, melancholically with a feeling of wonderful melodies, something that repeats continuously throughout the album, from "E" it moves to "C" then to "B," giving you chills... these guys are geniuses at channeling the maximum amount of emotions into a song... obviously all tending towards the melancholic and ultra-depressed.

After being lulled by "Murder," we reach the third track, "Day" (note that the first three tracks are called Brave, Murder, and Day), perhaps one of the most successful episodes, light-years away from the ballads that today's Katatonia offer us, a wonderful slow song, with electronic drums... and the clean voice of guest Mikael Akerfeldt (Opeth): something unique.
"Rainroom" unfortunately fails to move like the other tracks and most likely constitutes the album's weak point. A pity. A pity because afterward, there is a small gem: 12. The superimpositions of the two guitars throughout the track are something magnificent, managing the difficult task of touching something within your soul, leaving you breathless.

Why is this CD beautiful? Because after you have been able to touch melancholy and resignation transposed into music you will not be able to help but sigh... and a CD that makes you sigh surely has something more than the others.