Swallow The Sun
New Moon

Listening to Swallow the Sun is like undergoing a catharsis. 

Listening to them casually, perhaps in the car and for a short journey at that, is useless: just a waste of time. 

Sitting down, however, on an afternoon like this, to play their "New Moon" on the stereo ten, a hundred times, perhaps accompanied by hefty doses of caffeine and nicotine, is what I sincerely feel like recommending: Swallow the Sun is a "meditation" band. Please don't laugh. I'm speaking damn seriously. 

Their genre, derived from the most perverse blend between Death and Doom, may seem monolithic at first "ear" glance, muddy, even difficult, but I assure you that this is friendly to patience and passion more than anything else. In fact, you need to listen to them and re-listen to them to feel captured by the piercing tragic and sad undertones that their sound constantly engulfs, you need to taste it little by little and go beyond the bitter spite of furious screams, delve through their cavernous growl (incidentally one of the best out there) that seems "to shake the earth", and surrender to their rapidly changing atmospheres as in a kaleidoscope.

At that point, you find yourself completely immersed in landscapes that yes, many will argue are stereotyped and overused, but which, given with such a degree of refinement and with such a flair, become something fascinating and heterogeneous, completely detached from the basic philosophy that melody should serve as a magnet to attract attention and arouse interest in the listener. In this album, it is exactly the opposite. In this work, it is the dissonances, softened by their sharp, albeit present ferocity, that mix and become a melodic framework, tinged with a deep and impenetrable black, with brilliant and precious edges of negative and sad sensations and moods that accompany the mind to unknown places, lost who knows where or unrecognizable, even if already traversed many times.

This is Swallow the Sun in this album: the perfect alchemy between the heavy and oppressive lead of darkness and the gold of exorcizing the most hidden fears, nostalgia, sadness, more: despair.

"Empty, Gloomy, and Despair". Three words that perfectly dress the music of Swallow the Sun and that in New Moon have reached their compositional peak, their incredible and expressive summation. It only hurts to be aware that, unfortunately, it will be difficult to do better than this, and therefore in the future, we will not know what to expect from this band, but for now, at this moment, all we have to do is sit down, close our eyes, and fully enjoy the songs being offered.

None of them, and I emphasize absolutely none, fall into even a fleeting moment of boredom: all are thought out and written to represent a long monologue. Always the same, but presented in different keys, starting, for example, from their best effort in this context "Falling World", where, among other things, the almost subdued and whispered voice of singer Mikko Kotamäki performs a dreamy and ethereal work, in full contrast with the instrumental base which, although having many melodic insights, always preserves that granite-like beastly trademark of Swallow the Sun.

Other keys, then, can be represented by the long and exhausting "Weight of the Dead", where instead something comes to mind straddling a Suicidal Black Metal and a Funeral Doom of Tyranny origin. In both cases the result, if it wasn’t clear until now, is exceptional. And these are just examples of mine, which deliberately leave out the rest of the track-list on purpose, just so that anyone who listens to this album (and I hope there will be many), can draw something to jealously keep for themselves. As happened to me listening, finally, to the eponymous "New Moon".
Precisely what I expected from a band like Swallow the Sun, in short.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the best work of the year, which aggressively competes with the latest work of Paradise Lost, with an index that decisively points towards the present. Not for the obvious stylistic differences that everyone can deduce, but rather because this, always in the "emotional" discussion, manages to give me in a more massive way, exactly what I am looking for in a musical genre that I preemptively and generically define as "dark".

I sincerely hope, therefore, that "New Moon" reaches the ears of those who, reading me, will have understood what I've been talking about so far.