Moonflowers ［3LP+2CD］

Swallow the Sun released 2019s When a Shadow Is Forced into the Light after the death of guitarist/songwriter Juha Raivios life partner, poet and vocalist Aleah Stanbridge, who succumbed to cancer in late 2016. After that moving, grief-stricken outing, the band was unable to tour due to the COVID-19 pandemics global shutdown. Raivio, stuck in isolation in the midst of a Finnish winter, had no choice but to follow the dictates of his terrible muse and write. Moonflowers reflects its composers meditations on and struggles with desolate loneliness. These eight songs are gorgeously presented with classical strings, lush keyboards, and Mikko Kotamäkis (mostly clean) vocals. Opener Moonflowers Bloom in Misery balances its doleful plucked-guitar melody with sad orchestral strings. Guitars frame Kotamäkis lilting, gentle vocal before the bridge erupts with force and harmonic dual lead guitar lines. Enemy opens with merciless heaviness and harsher vocals that alternate with more tempered singing amid powerful, droning riffs and swelling keyboards atop tom-toms. Woven into Sorrow features an anthemic guitar vamp roaring above swelling keyboards and cascading strings. A throbbing bassline clangs against them, buoying Kotamäkis vocal. Keep Your Heart Safe from Me begins as a massive midtempo prog chugfest. Dynamics between stripped-down, spacious verses and punishing, bleeding-edge doom metal fit like hand in glove. Amid this unhinged brutality are tender instrumental interludes where melody, harmony, and pillowy textures share an uneasy space. All Hallows Grieve commences like a cross between the blues and a prog jam before swirling, phase-shifted guitars and a wordless female vocal chorus paint the foreground. Accompanied by a lilting piano, guest vocalist Cammie Anderson (Ocean of Slumber) duets with Kotamäki atop swirling Mellotrons, strings, a bluesy guitar line, and reverbed snares and tom-toms. The Void is fueled by Matti Honkonens bubbling bassline. It holds ambient space as guitars trade the spotlight with strings, Mellotrons, and Juuso Raatikainens majestic yet menacing drums. Closer The House Has No Home commences with plucked cellos hovering atop Kotamäkis singing: This house has no home/This home has no heart... before bone-crushing riffs and blastbeat drums force him to scream. He struggles to sing slowly and cleanly, but buzzing, blackened guitars reinforce the primal-scream delivery. Raivio wrote these eight songs twice: once for the band and once as instrumental classical pieces for chamber strings and piano. The latter versions were recorded in a church by Finlands Trio N O X and are presented here as a bonus disc. Raivio also painted the red moon disc cover in his own blood under dried white flowers. Moonflowers is stunningly beautiful, but it offers little hope. Its thematic reflections of sorrow, horror, loneliness, desperation, and desolation are, in Raivios inner creative world, hallmarks of Western civilization and the terrible truth that hides in the human heart after experiences of profound loss. ~ Thom Jurek