AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): AEONIAN SORROW — “KATARA”

In the Pindus mountains of northern Greece there is a pass called Katara. We are told that according to the legend, “Katara got its name from a despot who around 1800 set out from Ioannina to go to Trikala city, but the bad weather in the area made it so difficult for him that he died on the way and he cursed the mountain”.

Many tragic stories have been written about this pass, and the Greek/Finnish doom-metal collective Aeonian Sorrow have now written their own, although their new album Katara, which will be released tomorrow, includes other stories as well — and it is dedicated to the memory of Georgia and Michail, beloved grandparents of the band’s singer Gogo Melone.

The lyric stories included in Katara do vary across the album’s seven substantial songs, all of them heart-felt, but they are stories of deep loss, despair, and anger — heart-breaking and harrowing, as well as heart-felt. Gogo has explained how they all came to be:

On a personal level, I’ve been through enough difficult changes in my life that it almost made it impossible to keep myself motivated to complete this album. I said several times that I don’t want to do this and I almost didn’t. What kept me going was the reason I started this band and the promise I gave to the grandmother I lost back in 2020 and said that the Katara album will be recorded in her memory and her husband’s memory too. It will be done for all the years I spent driving to those scary “Katara” roads to go see them. It will be done for each song I wrote inside their empty house when they were gone, and I was left to watch the walls and nothing more.

On a music level, I think the band has also been through enough and faced the financial critical moments to where we had to take choices, a bit unusual for us, and find ways to make things happen without losing ourselves and our quality. The path to success is full of heavy stones and very lonely so we do what we can and continue writing music from our hearts.

“Writing from the heart”… that comes through loud and clear in the music of Katara. The passion blooms in the vocals, which range from Gogo‘s ethereal, haunting expressions, spine-tingling when they soar sky-high, to the cavernous, monstrous growls of Joel Notkonen, but not only there.

It also comes through with power in the immense heaviness of the riffs, which stalk and jolt, shiver and seethe, and in the rumbling and neck-cracking riot of the drumwork. The visceral, “physical” force of the music is undeniable — sometimes it seems like an earthquake in progress, or mountain boulders slowly raining down.

As you might expect, the passion also flows through the music in melodies of stricken grief and inner turmoil, which are traced in different ways, sometimes through the mournful ring of a piano or shimmering synths of gossamer lightness and panoramic sweep, but also through wrenching guitar-and-bass chords whose craggy tones abrade like heavy-grit sandpaper applied to the soul, and trilling guitar-leads that become carriers of tragic beauty.

But that “beauty and the beast” vocal tandem referred to earlier send the songs to their highest peaks of emotional intensity, when even those ravaging growls rise up in throat-ruining pain, trading off with Gogo Melone‘s striking crystalline voice (which is very much a well-earned exception to the “rule” in our site’s name).

As you travel through Katara‘s stories, it becomes very easy to get lost in them, pulled down into dark troughs of despondency and propelled high toward crescendos of terrible magnificence and mystical wonder. It’s an album with its own compelling gravitational force, perhaps most likely to bring fans of My Dying Bride, Swallow the Sun, Daylight Dies, and Draconian within its orbit, but something that all fans of dark melodic metal should appreciate.

And with that introduction we’ll leave you to get lost on your own in our premiere stream of Katara:

 

 

AEONIAN SORROW’s KATARA Lineup:
Joel Notkonen – Vocals
Gogo Melone – Vocals, songwriting, keyboards
Taneli Jämsä – Guitars
Achilleas Papagrigoriou – Drums
Jukka Jauhiainen – Guitars
Oskar Englund – Session studio bass

Katara was produced, mixed, and mastered at Deep Noise Studios in Finland by Saku Moilanen, who has also produced music by bands such as Wolfheart, Before the Dawn, Kaunis Kuolematon, Red Moon Architect, and more. The album is available for order now.

Following the release of Katara, Aeonian Sorrow will embark on a small European Tour alongside As The Sun Falls and Sanity Obscure. Check out the confirmed dates below.

ORDER NOW:
https://aeoniansorrow.com/merch/
https://aeoniansorrow.bandcamp.com/

MORE LINKS:
Official website: www.aeoniansorrow.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/aeoniansorrowofficial
Bandcamp: aeoniansorrow.bandcamp.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/aeoniansorrow
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5MKv3s6qLAASgv80ilSAN0

AEONIAN SORROW TOUR

03.11.23 // PL // Warsaw
04.11.23 // DE // Berlin
05.11.23 // FR // Lille
06.11.23 // BE // Diest
08.11.23 // DE // Morlenbach
09.11.23 // DE // Hamburg
10.11.23 // LT // Kaunas
11.11.23 // LV // Riga
17.11.23 // FI // Tampere
18.11.23 // FI // Vantaa