The Metamorphosis Melody

Looks like Liv Kristine has a bit of competition in her sister's band, rather surprisingly. Midnattsol is an unusual band with their mixture of folk and symphonic metal. Normally I find that folk works better with death metal elements, but actually this album is surprisingly good. It fits far better than the name of the genre led me to believe.

Admittedly Liv is a far better singer than Carmen is. I don't know precisely what the reasons are for me thinking this, but I find Liv's voice a lot nicer to listen to. While she possesses a high and angelic voice, Carmen's is lower and generally less pleasant to listen to. I'm not saying that she's bad, but living up to her sister's standards was always going to be difficult and as expected, she fails to top them. The lyrics are also a bit simple and sometimes out of place, but for the most part they're hard to make out anyway and I don't indulge myself in them anyway.

The symphonic and folk elements are actually surprisingly well hidden considering that those are the two genres that the band is supposed to be playing. The keyboard is noticeably present, but it never comes to the forefront of the band. As for the mouth harp, it doesn't have too much of an effect either. Actually, it has less of one than the keyboard. There are the occasional acoustic pieces, but that's about all that can be counted as folk metal (and let's be honest, acoustic pieces are used by bands in nearly every genre). The rest of the time it just doesn't feel that much like folk metal.

There are points that I come to close to calling this melodic death metal. The main reason I say that is because the guitars seem to like to make the melodies that the band rely on, and since the keyboard isn't doing too much that means they get all the glory. Considering that I was expecting them to just play simple riffs and let something else take command, they're surprisingly well-played. While they create the melodies they also manage to sound heavy (unlike some bands I've listened to), and it's actually a surprise to be told that there aren't any really heavy metal influences in there. I'd certainly say there were.

The best track is My Re-Creation. It has a bit of a slow start with only the acoustics, but once the song gets going it does it in a really big way. It has a sort of epic feel to it, with some real power to drive it home. The vocals fit in quite well on this track and there's a more folky sound to the track than across the rest of the album. By the end of the song you almost feel sad that it's over, it is one of the very few songs that I wish was ten minutes long.

It's actually hard to say exactly what this album does feel like. There's a bit melodeath in there, I guess the vocals could be counted as symphonic, there is the occasional bit of folk, some standard heavy metal power and the music has a sort of semi-epic feel to it. Whatever you want to call it though, it is very good and worth a listen.