For this edition of Mashup Spotlight, we are doing something slightly different in that instead of featuring an album outside of recent memory, we are placing our gaze (or ears) upon a recent release. So recent in fact, that I still have the receipt lying around from when I bought it on the 25th of January.
Coming in at album number seven for the Finish death/doom veterans, ‘When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light’ comes packed with an elegant melancholy made even more profound under the shadow of such raw and overwhelming loss. Displaying a more emotive blend of death/doom than that of their 2015 triple-album epic entitled ‘Songs From The North I, II, III’, ‘When A Shadow’ carries a gloom so heavy that even moments of hushed reflection become just as crushing as the deliberate slug of the guitars.
Fuelled and powered by Juha Raivio’s sheer will to continue following the tragic and untimely death of bandmate and life partner Aleah Stanbridge, music and death/doom in particular has become the conduit through which lead songwriter Raivio can filter and process his pain, as he struggles to come to terms with his loss. Informing his writing, Raivio’s everlasting dedication to Stanbridge feels much like ‘Lumina Aurea’ in that it is equal parts an invasion of a very personal journey to acceptance and a masterpiece of the genre.
Coming across as surprisingly soft and restrained given the sheer weight of the album’s conceptual perspective, ‘When A Shadow’ has a noticeably strong gothic flavour that permeates the album’s rich tapestry of crushing hooks and well-structured melancholic movements. Featuring a masterful blend of gloomy post-metal, black metal shrills and your staple death/doom, the album opens on a grand scale to a lengthy melodic track that acts as the albums overture in that ‘When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light’ features elements from all the layers of musical sorrow that are to follow, including the expertly executed naked vulnerability of Mikko Kotamäki’s vocal melodies.
Able to enact a tonal shift at the drop of a chord, the guitars on this record do an amazing job of accenting the heartbreak of the lyrical content whilst itself, creating waves of emotional intensity with each note dripping with melancholy and each chord throwing out streaks of mood against a beautiful backdrop of pain provided by the keys and the strings. Even the drum patterns are composed in such a way as to convey as little aggression as possible whilst still being ever present in the mix. Each empathetic hit heavy with the weight of deep longing for a loved one passed.
Coming in at around 52 minutes, ‘When A Shadow Is Forced into The Light’ is the shortest of Swallow The Sun’s releases, yet in many ways it is the most rich. Not only due to the circumstances surrounding its creation but also because of the artistic nuance of each of the eight tracks. Unique in their own way, as you peel back musical layer after musical layer of sorrowful melancholy, the range of sounds present on ‘When A Shadow Is Forced into The Light’ presents a colourful exploration of grief and provides a poignant reminder that death may be stronger than life, but love is stronger than death.
Be sure to check out ‘When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light’ and catch the video for ‘Firelights’ below.