Swallow the Sun – Plague of Butterflies

Releasedate: 17-09-2008; Label: Spinefarm Records
By: Elvira Visser

Swallow the Sun is a Finnish doom-metal band from Finland, founded by Juha Raivio. Over the last years they have proven to deliver great albums, such as their previous one “Hope” where they had Tomi Joutsen (Amorphis) and Jonas Renske (Katatonia) as guest vocalist. This album was greatly received around the world. Now it is time for a new chapter, releasing “Plague of Butterflies”, while waiting for their next full length album.

“Plague of Butterflies” is something special. The CD has one new track, but not just a track. It consists of three chapters and the duration of the track is 35 minutes. The first chapter is called “losing sunset” and starts with the sound of a windy breeze. As if you are walking into a dark forest leaving the sun behind. Ready to be swallowed by the music. The band is a very good doom-metal band but delivers more than that, their music brings you a lot more which you will discover on your journey through these chapters. The combination of the melancholic doom and melodic metal is something that these guys know how to play.

When making a track with a duration of 35 minutes it needs to have that little something that keeps you, the listener, captured. And this will happen to you. They created a great flow of the album, while listening to calm instrumental parts, to the more melodic parts, the clean vocals from Mikko Kotmaki or his screaming. They take the time to create something as a whole. Every guitar riff sounds perfect, well placed and well thought over. This all combined and the twist in the chapters is what keeps you listening. The music really tells you a story from only hearing a sea, or wind breeze which actually gives me the shivers joined by a melancholic dark cello. Where the guitar melodies, atmospheric keyboards from Alexi Munter and drums from Pasi Pasanen take over and where Mikko starts to scream. Basically it takes you on a journey from a calm melodic atmosphere to the dark, brutal aspects, but you need to listen to this track a couple of times before you can really say something about it. There is just so much to hear. I simply find it a monster track, an amazing piece of music/song writing.

The second part has the bands early work, which was on their fist demo “Out of This Gloomy Light”. The tracks also shows how versatile they can be. The tracks are: “Through Her Silvery Body”, “Out of This Gloomy Light”, “Swallow” and “Under the Waves”. Four great tracks. Where they already show how good they are in combining melodic parts with hard extremer parts.

Links:
Swallow the Sun MySpace
Swallow the Sun Official