(Here’s DGR‘s review of Swallow the Sun‘s new album, which was released a couple weeks ago by Century Media.)
Listening to Swallow The Sun‘s newest album Shining, you get the sense that this is the sort of album every doom band has in them and one that they’d slowly been building toward for some time. In that sense, Shining is a fascinating release because after hesitantly testing waters more and more with each record, much of the material on Shining sounds like the band themselves were finally ready to make the jump.
Of course, with Swallow the Sun it is always going to feel like there is an overarching narrative because – credit to the band for being as brave as they are – they haven’t really been shy about personal struggles and tragedies over the years. Maybe, Shining is an album that Swallow The Sun needed to make, as a chance to escape and set themselves free of the artistic frost that they’ve long called home.
Shining is Swallow The Sun‘s ninth album, though you could argue that they’re actually deeper in, given some of their EP releases. Plague Of Butterflies batting at over thirty-plus minutes easily puts it in that nebulous “is you is, or is you not, a full-length release?” argument. Swallow The Sun have made doom a hallmark of their style, and have over time evolved into being vanguards of the genre as one of the few able to straddle the line of being an approachable gateway yet still able to drag someone into a ten-minute song with ease.
They’ve become masters of a bleak and depressing world, one in which sadness is ever present. Their music is constructed of heartache and loss and they have amassed an incredible amount of material out of that particular musical vein. It’s what attracts a young man to the genre and over time grows with them until they’re steadily creeping towards old and writing reviews to keep thoughts from swirling in their head until critical mass causes some sort of shutdown.
Swallow The Sun‘s prior two albums, When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light and Moonflowers, hit especially hard. Early albums of heartache and loss over the years constructed out of artistic desire and imagined situation, yet as we grow older such things eventually become far too real, like a weight placed upon the shoulders that no amount of artistic expression is ever going to release.
You can’t fault Swallow The Sun for aiming somewhere different and up-tempo, likely having pushed themselves as far as they could possibly want to go with their particular style. Shining finally presents the opportunity for the band to break out the occasional melodeath skills they’ve hinted at over the years or create something less overwhelmingly mournful and more along the lines of “distant and pensive”. Shining is the chance for Swallow The Sun to make a grab for a seat at the table of the depressive rock crowd.
It’s impressive, actually, just how much a shift in how an album is produced can change the approach of how you experience a release. Shining has received quite the glossy, clean, and sleek production pass versus the overwhelming atmospherics of previous Swallow The Sun albums. It’s a path the band have been on for a while now, with them testing the waters more and more each release. Still, what is surprising even after all the recalibration and understanding of what Shining represents to the overall discography for Swallow the Sun, is both the focus on sing-along hooks in many of the choruses present on this album – the fact that you could even treat it as a verse-chorus-verse style album ranking up there as well – and the modern rock treatment the drums have received.
If you’ve listened to active rock radio at any point in the last decade, it is guaranteed you have heard this exact snare-drum approach. Almost to such a point that it brings it to the forefront of Shining, in detriment to quite a few still good songs on here.
Shining has some genuine seeds of promise for future Swallow The Sun material. Taken at face value, it is a pretty good collection of singles. It’s not the Swallow The Sun you’ve gotten used to over the years and any outcry over them effectively belly-sliding their way into Katatonia‘s playground is justified, yet if resigned to an idea of “If they’re going to follow this path then…”, you’ll find more than your fair share of solid songs throughout Shining. As mentioned above, this is something they’ve been playing with idea-wise for a long time now and it has become more and more prominent since songs like “Night Will Forgive Us” from Emerald Forest And The Blackbird.
Lest we forget, they’ve already done both short-form doom and the emotionally distant and cold acoustic approach on the first two discs from Songs From The North. The jump into something more rocking isn’t necessarily as large as you might think. If anything, and to be honest probably where we’ve struggled to describe Shining and why this has felt like we’re spinning in a literary circle, is that musically it is a very lateral move for Swallow The Sun – just with some fucking big rock-production drumkit.
Weirdly, given the focus on just how much of a sheen Shining has, you’d expect an album like this to take a traditional incredibly frontloaded approach. It’s a tale as old as time itself and such a commonly used tactic that sometimes it feels like albums consisting of “Here’s the songs we figured out have the most appeal, and now here’s the stuff the drummer wrote”. Shining is more even-keeled than that and part of it is due to the fact that even though Swallow The Sun are diving headfirst into the depressive rock genre, they still dedicate about forty percent of Shining to those slower, doom-heavy and outright depressing moments. Songs like “Kold” – one letter away from some fantastic corpsepaint unfortunately – “What I Have Become”, the titular “Shining”, and “Charcoal Sky” all still have the airs of classic Swallow The Sun attached to them. They’re more rollicking at times but if you enjoy the rolling waves style of guitar riff and the vocals matching it in tectonic intensity then those are songs that Swallow The Sun seemingly wrote specifically for you.
“Shining” itself benefits from the long run time of over eight minutes, allowing for some moments of absolute beauty as different melodic lines reprise themselves throughout the slow, atmospheric crawl of the song. “What I Have Become” surfacing so early, on the other hand, is a solid track that is also Swallow The Sun hedging their bets and assuring people that Shining won’t be a completely clean-sung affair. Again, this seems strange since they’ve been dancing closer and closer to that particular cliff’s edge of a career shift for a few albums now, and the second Songs From The North disc shows they can do it. At this point, it would have been more fascinating to watch the band go wholly over.
Otherwise the collection of singles spread throughout Shining are fairly enjoyable if a little light on the substance side. These are songs built around big chorus hooks, and many of those could easily bore their way into your memory long after you’ve stopped listening to this particular disc. “MelancHoly” has been out for some time now but damned if that particular lead-up and launch into the chorus line of the song doesn’t hold on with death’s grip for some time. Same with “Innocence Was Long Forgotten” and “Tonight Pain Believes”. Although it is clear as you get deeper into Shining that the bag of material doesn’t quite stretch as well as Swallow The Sun would like it too, so there’s a bit of repetition in the back half of the album.
Yet, in spite of all that, there is one genuine killer of a track, which is where the compromise ‘if they insist on traveling this path, please do more like this’ comes into play, and that is the fourth song on Shining, “Under The Moon & Sun”.
“Under The Moon & Sun” is where all the ideas that weave their way throughout Shining finally seem to coalesce. It happens early in the album but you can hear all of the disparate threads that Swallow The Sun are pulling on finally tying themselves together here. Yes, it is part of that group up front that is mostly clean-sung but it has one of the most memorable melodies and straightforward guitar riffs on the whole album. If Swallow The Sun seek to fully travel the path out of the world of intensely depressing and overbearing doom, a song like “Under The Moon & Sun” certainly wouldn’t hurt to be the one they draw from for future releases. It balances every element of the group’s sound near perfectly, and so much so that the actual harsh part that briefly rears its head feels like a concession to the band’s writing style more so than something actually needed.
Shining is an enjoyable album and one that you could see Swallow The Sun building toward for some time. You could understand that maybe they felt they had wrung their particular style completely dry, worn it down to ossified bones, and so they sought to make the jump elsewhere. It’s not too surprising a musical hop for the band either, so it is easy to understand how people might be blindsided by it while others might hear it and view it as a blindingly shiny version of Moonflowers before it. Swallow The Sun have certainly been kicking around long enough that they can do a depressive-rock album or a melancholy-inflected melodeath track blindfolded and with an arm tied behind their backs, and that is much of what Shining consists of.
Partially a “hey, we can do that too!” style release and partially an attempt at creative escape for a while to avoid being forever musically ensconced with furrowed brow and cold wind blowing outside. Shining could hold a lot of appeal if you need something more up-tempo and have enjoyed Swallow The Sun‘s previous dalliances with it. It is not the musical endless weight of depression forever resting on your shoulders, like the weight of the world intending to make a person-sized indentation in the street where you stand, where Swallow The Sun have specialized in the past, but as a collection of straightforward singles with a lot of frozen atmosphere attached to it, Shining is a solid release.
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