Swallow The Sun

When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light

This is such a disappointing metal release. The sung vocals made me groan when I first heard them, not only because of the cringe-worthy lyrics, but their exaggerated and overly theatrical delivery. The string accompanied instrumentation also makes this album lose any bite it may have had. The rarely used screamed black metal vocals are this album's one highlight, but it's not worth suffering through the rest of the terribly bland, semi-acoustic moments to get to a brief shining ending. ... read more

While I admire a lot of the emotion and technical ability that goes into these songs, a lot of these are simply too long and samey to really get into. Every song has a painfully slow tempo, and the verses and choruses sound exactly the same from song to song.

HOWEVER

The opening song is completely worth listening to. It has the best vocals, the best melody, and is really good.

If you are into doom, I'd recommend it, but I didn't get a ton of enjoyment out of it.

First, A Pale Horse Named Death releases one of the best gothic doom metal albums of the past few years. Now, Swallow The Sun is releasing a godly mix of death-doom, gothic doom, melodic death metal and traditional doom metal to stellar results. Possible AOTY contender for me. This is going to be a great year.

When it comes to doom metal, everything is rather melancholic. IMO, it can sometimes require a lot of patience to make it through an entire album. This was the case for me, for I had been listening to a couple of songs here and there, but could never really get into it enough to focus on everything going on. I finally sat down and had a focused listen. From what I heard I was rather surprised. I listen to many sub-genres of metal, but doom has never really been at the top of my radar. However, ... read more