Insomnium – Winter’s Gate

[schema type=”review” name=”Insomnium – Winter’s Gate” description=”Label: Century Media Records” author=”Basak Günel” pubdate=”2016-09-23″ ]

Insomnium is a melodic death metal band from Finland. Formed in 1997, they have become one of the cult bands in the MDM scene. After having kept us waiting for 2 years, they have released “Winter’s Gate” last month.

After the huge success of the previous release “Shadows of the Dying Sun”, Insomnium decided to do something out-of-the box with “Winter’s Gate”. What’s so special about this record is the fact that it’s a concept album which consists of one 40-minute-long song. The concept is built around the short story Winter’s Gate (Talven portti in Finnish) which has been written by the vocalist Niilo Sevänen and even won awards; it’s about a group of Vikings who set out to find a fabled island west from Ireland, even though the winter is drawing near. Even before the album release, the band has already given signs of a rather different sound for this album and this was indeed the case.

When you imagine a 40-minute long song, you would expect not only one pattern or one style but a harmony of many genres and with “Winter’s Gate”, Insomnium has definitely delivered the perfect mixture of these different patterns within one mosaic. I can even say that the band has experimented in the sense that they tried to push the boundaries to see how progressive they can get with their melodic death metal sound without losing their essence; all in all, the typical Insomnium sound we are used to is there. Apart from this highlight, I (as always with the Insomnium albums), fell in love with the harmony of clean-harsh vocals. The choirs here and there make me shiver every time I listen to the record. Well.. Insomnium is Insomnium and this is something they can manage really well!

When we dig deep into the song, we see different parts and different stories; more specifically, the song is divided into 7 parts. I won’t spoil the short story here but after reading it, I can say that the band depicted the whole atmosphere really well as the story also has different parts and different perspectives within. Considering the story-line, I found it really clever that the band experimented with a lot of genres like black metal, progressive/melodic metal (like Amorphis) and post-black metal even. Of course this will make more sense when you read the story and maybe listen to the album at the same time. But even without reading the story, you will experience how the sound develops within one song; like a wave, the album starts in a typical Insomnium sound that we know but develops into a proggy/calmer approach and then gets darker and more brutal towards the end. Some black metal riffs (which are a tribute to the old BM era I guess) accompany us and indeed warn us that winter is coming…. So if you have not the read the story yet, the concept album is a great foreshadowing of the story.

There is a lot to be said about the album and the story but I would recommend you to buy the record and read the story so that you can interpret your own version of “Winter’s Gate”. You will be definitely surprised at how one 40-minute long song will flow and widen your imagination and emotions. Kudos to Insomnium for experimenting and widening their sound without losing their essence! All in all, everyone makes melodic death metal nowadays but not everyone can experiment and take this genre to a whole next level.

Line-up:
Niilo Sevänen – vocals, bass
Markus Vanhala – guitar
Ville Friman – guitar, vocals
Markus Hirvonen – drums

Tracklist: Winter’s Gate

Links:
Insomnium Official
Insomnium Facebook