Album Review: Swallow the Sun, Moonflowers
Moonflowers is the eighth full-length from Jyväskylä, Finland-based Swallow the Sun, who’ve worked with Century Media since issuing their 2015 triple-album, Songs From the North I, II & III (review here). Comprised of founders Juha Raivio (guitar), Mikko Kotamaki (vocals) and Matti Honkonen (bass), as well as drummer Juuso Raatikainen, guitarist Juho Raiha, and keyboardist/backing vocalist Janni Peuhu (who’ll sit out the touring cycle for Moonflowers owing to commitments to his other band, Mercury Circle), they celebrated the band’s 20th anniversary earlier this year with the release of 20 Years of Gloom, Beauty and Despair: Live in Helsinki, captured at Tavastia Club in Feb. 2020, but Moonflowers feels no less like a victory lap when it comes to their stylistic accomplishments, sweeping grandiosity — looking at you, the solo in “Keep Your Heart Safe From Me” — emotive resonance and melding of slower extreme metal, death-doom and lush melodicism.
On paper, this has been their aesthetic foundation all along, since 2003’s The Morning Never Came brought such revitalizing energy to a modus that bands like Katatonia and My Dying Bride, even Paradise Lost, had largely left behind at that point, but it says little of the craft Swallow the Sun bring to their material, their refinement across offerings like 2005’s Ghosts of Loss, 2007’s Hope, 2009’s New Moon (review here) and 2012’s Emerald Forest and the Blackbird (discussed here) commitment to challenging themselves in songwriting and performance two decades on from their inception, and the ensuing influence they’ve had on European doom in doing so.
At 52:40, Moonflowers is the second-shortest album that Swallow the Sun have ever made by all of nine seconds — 2019’s When a Shadow is Forced into the Light (review here) ran 52:31 — but that brings into emphasis the efficiency of a track like second cut “Enemy” or the opening semi-titular “Moonflowers Bloom in Misery,” which vary in structure between gracefully flowing sections and smashes between loud/quiet tradeoffs, and along with the subsequent, longer “Woven into Sorrow” and “Keep Your Heart Safe From Me,” welcome the listener back into the morose world the band are so adept at creating.
What might seem like novelty, a bonus instrumental version of Moonflowers that features the orchestral sections of the tracks performed by Finland’s Trio NOX further serves to highlight Swallow the Sun‘s songwriting. “Moonflowers Bloom in Misery,” or the later “The Void” — which is plenty flowing in either incarnation — as even the melodies that in the “full” versions fill out and complement the songs prove memorable enough to stand on their own. On Moonflowers proper, it is the earlier tracks that do the bulk of the work in carrying forward the lasting impression; the choruses of “Moonflowers Bloom in Misery,” “Enemy” and “Woven into Sorrow” acting like the more straightforward fare ahead of the atmospheric side B that begins with “All Hallows’ Grieve,” which features Oceans of Slumber vocalist Cammie Gilbert alongside Kotamaki, and continues into “The Void” and “The Fight of Your Life” ahead of the striking, black metal-adjacent finish of “This House Has No Home,” which is something of a sucker-punch after the immersion preceding.
In the overarching structure, Moonflowers doesn’t operate so differently from When a Shadow is Forced into the Light, but where there it was the opening title-track as the standout, here the material after lives up to the high standard that “Moonflowers Bloom in Misery” sets. “Enemy” hits hard at the outset but sets its course initially led by the melody before the crash cymbal and the growling prechorus take hold, shifting to the hook itself, which is also clean-sung. The growl of Kotamaki and his arrangements of melodic and brutal vocals aren’t to be understated when it comes to the crucial aspects of Swallow the Sun. On “Woven into Sorrow,” he moves between a verse that brings to mind the Queensrÿche radio hit “Silent Lucidity” and a set back chorus, building to an eventual release of tension in the second half that is a defining moment for the record as a whole, let alone the first four of its eight component pieces.
It’s worth noting that the vinyl edition of Moonflowers breaks down across four sides with two songs each. As to how flipping platters between “Enemy” and “Woven into Sorrow” or “The Void” and “The Fight of Your Life” might change the listening experience, I can’t say, but the linear progression from the first half of the album into the second is such that Swallow the Sun effectively lead their audience farther down a path until the forceful delivery of “This House Has No Home” acts as a lash-out payoff for everything that preceded it.
That the band remain so identifiably themselves across the span of Moonflowers is a joy and a triumph in itself, if perhaps an expected one given that they are 20 years on from first getting together. Whatever the format in which one might encounter it, what Moonflowers adds to Swallow the Sun‘s legacy, pedigree or whatever you want to call it is another representative forward step in their steady growth. They are not revolutionizing their sound or the genre as a whole — they weren’t the first in their style by any means — but they have over time made themselves a standard-bearer in melodic death-doom precisely because of efforts like this, and the reward for the listener comes in letting go and trusting the band to lead the experience as they do.
Because there isn’t really an aspect of Swallow the Sun that’s left to chance at this point, but for every layer of depth in the mix of a track like “The Fight of Your Life” and for every fluid shift in “Woven into Misery,” the construction supporting it is likewise thoughtful and complete. There is never a doubt as to the band’s control of the procession — that’s not to say “dirge,” but one could — and whether one engages with it on the level of mood or simply delights in the cathartic pummel of its heaviest stretches, Moonflowers is a stirring reminder of why Swallow the Sun have endured as long as they have and why they’ll hopefully continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
One of my most anticipated releases of the year. “When a Shadow…” was AOTY for me in 2019. And this comes out on my birthday too…!