Alright, I've revised my review in light of Cheeses comments, and I do think its quite a bit better but again I'll throw it out for more comments. I didn't make every change you suggested, but I tightened up more or less the entire review. So, here's the revision.
NOTE: If you see any other grammar problems let me know, because my Word didn't pick up the ones Cheeses mentioned already and others besides.
Green Carnation - Light of Day, Day of Darkness
98%
In metal, there is a great potential for the kind of art that has in many ways left this world. As the purest child of classical composition in the world of popular music, metal has access to the both the fury and gut-level verve of rock as well as the grandeur and scope of the symphony, and because of this it is capable of achieving incredible things. While I am not so elitist as to dismiss the equally powerful magic of the perfect rock single or the almighty glory of The Riff, there is an art above and beyond, beneath and beside.
Green Carnation’s “Light of Day, Day of Darkness” is an example of metal that reaches for art, and while it is not the first or the last to do so, it is amongst the most successful in achieving this goal. The ambition here can’t be missed, the band seemingly hell bent on leaving some sort of mark on metal, as if to raise a glass to the competition and say ‘Well, here’s the vanguard, just try and out-prog THIS’. Constant subtlety-free one-upmanship has long been a hallmark of progressive rock as band after band write longer, more technical, more esoteric works in an effort to distance themselves from the pack. In the end though, they only succumb to their own clichés and wind up forgotten when the next wave rolls on over their intricate (but ultimately foundation-less) sandcastles.
What makes “Light of Day, Day of Darkness” an accomplishment that will stand the test of time is that, regardless of the nature of the band’s reason for writing an hour-long song is, no hint of such base silliness bleeds into the music. The material is dense and conceptual to the point of absurdity, but it is all executed with such purity of vision and tastefulness that instead of laughing at the art school dropout flights of fancy, one is instead drawn deeper into the heart of the mystery, sitting with chin resting on palm surrounded by glass walls and signs reading Caution: Deep Thoughts in Progress.
Every instrument on this record contributes to the whole and nothing for an instant feels out of place. With most prog acts, you’re going to get a lot of widdly show-ish instrumentation that doesn’t have a great deal to do with the overall direction of the piece. The best of the more tech-oriented prog acts have the ability to make these digressions a journey in themselves, while the lesser lights merely seek to prove their ability to shred in obtuse time signatures. LOD, DOD is hardly simple, but its complexity comes in its musical density. There are layers and layers of sound, at times dozens of tracks going at once but Green Carnation are blessed with uncommonly good composition and absolutely pristine production. The riffs in the beginning of the song are rather stock doom riffs, much more about the ominous sturm and drang and the ominous sensations than about trying to replace “Smoke on the Water”, the DNA unchanged since Black Sabbath – “Black Sabbath”, Black Sabbath. However, guitarist and composer Tchort plays them with an uncommon energy, heavy but not trudging, I believe intentionally writing simple earthy riffs to anchor music that is bordered and shaded by highly involved keys and string melodies. At other places in the song the riffs are grand and eloquent, sometimes atmospheric, never less than superb.
When writing a song that is over twenty minutes long, most writers tend to break up the track “2112”-style with sharp delineations between sections in order to prevent the listener from becoming bored and, from a technical standpoint, to provide an excuse to do some rather jarring transitions. Green Carnation has been more like a Pink Floyd in that they simply let the song be very long without breaking it up at all, but this song isn’t nearly as jammy and simplistic as Floyd’s work. They arrive at somewhat of a happy medium between the brands of progressive rock, as the song has very different feelings and sounds within it but is built in such a way that it feels like one piece. With few exceptions, I would be hard-pressed to break this up into sections because it just feels like a whole. The way they accomplish this is through an extremely canny compositional style.
Suppose you want to get from near silence to an epic outro, how do you do it without feeling forced or choppy? Basically, you must build up to that point. Around the 35 minute mark of the song, the listener is left with only a woman’s voice wailing in the darkness accompanied by some lovely, mournful saxophone from guest musician Arvid Thorsen. There are bubbling noises in the background, a few touches of synth. This sounds like creation, the earth mother crying out as the world comes into form. Slowly we are reintroduced to electric guitar, building up into a funereal doom riff with chanting vocals overtop, building to a breaking point of volume. But they don’t have the momentum to really get to the climax yet, so down we go again through a few measures of graceful acoustics and synths and builds up to a far-greater zenith in lead guitarist Bjørn’s massive solo. I tell you, this thing is the work of immortals, evangelical fire melting the frets as he channels divine inspiration. As with many of the most powerful riffs on the album, the solo is marked by a career spent honing the techniques of black metal, but is played in the bombastic style of a John Petrucci or a Kirk Hammett. Thus, you often hear tremolo-picked riffs and other staples of the genre in a new way and with a more obvious passion than ever before.
As amazing as the solo itself is, it wouldn’t have had the impact without that languorous three-minute build-up from the quiet section, which itself was five to seven minutes. The amazing ride utilized the tension that had accumulated after such a long time away from the heavier side of the palette, and the lack of other solo spots in the song made it a truly explosive climax, later matched only by the closing fanfares. Perhaps an even stronger indication of how good the composition is that the song wastes no time following it up, again hauling the audience along through more glorious riffage and a vocal section that reminds me of something from the Pain of Salvation catalogue.
The vocals are handled by Kjetil Nordhus who turns in perhaps the most uneven performance, although that says little considering how good everything in general is. The song’s main recurring riff is a simple and repetitive one carried by the driving rhythm section, and the band was obviously looking for a mechanical resonance to his vocals which, while not a bad decision overall is one that leads to vocal melodies that are considerably less interesting than I was caterwauling when I was reading the lyrics along with the song before I’d become more than passingly familiar with it. At other places in the song he demonstrates a passionate, confident voice and he has the ability to imbue admirable character into it, and so during these repetitive sections his phrasing seems unnatural and cold. In spite of this, Nordhus does an admirable job of bringing life to what otherwise might have sounded like aimless navel-gazing masquerading as poetic contemplation. Which, considering how obscure the lyrics are, might still be true but if it is so additional kudos must go to Nordhus for so skilfully hiding this from me.
I have to say, I remain surprised that Green Carnation managed to execute this project so perfectly. Their ability of course is unquestioned, Tchort in particular being quite the black metal man about town including stints with Emperor and Satyricon, but even his name-appeal could only have reached a limited audience. How then did Green Carnation manage to command such lush production and such lavish sound? Being on a major (for metal) label helps of course, but this thing… sound-wise, it is perfect. Puts most major (for general music) label music to shame in fact.
However, nit-picking at every individual facet of “Light of Day, Day of Darkness” will bring me no closer to why it is great. It is in the whole that greatness and art emerges, how all of the individual components come together to create a progressive watershed, the benchmark within the subset of the almost quixotically epic, achieving where efforts like Tales From Topographic Oceans and “Crimson” didn’t quite. A song of this length has to earn the time you put into it, and it has to be more than a mere collection of riffs like, for example, “Crimson” is. After all, if you can accomplish the same thing with eight short songs that you can with one long one then the only reason to make a long song is to prove how ‘progressive’ you are in the most puerile sense of that word. This is an hour-long song that has more cohesion than songs a sixth its length, a song that is full and whole enough to withstand concentrated listening and yet is diaphanous enough to be a perfect ambient music. Why it is and how it is what it is are almost irrelevant compared to what it is:
Brilliant.
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hells_unicorn wrote: His [OSS] reviewing style sucks in my opinion, [...] and his humor is vapid at best and outright buffoonish at worst.
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