A Year of Music

Sometimes the nicest surprises are the ones that come attached to no expectations. Every so often I’ll throw something on my iPod just because it looks sort of intriguing and end up liking it a lot more than I would with music I’ve been looking forward to a lot longer. Such is the case with Swallow the Sun and their engaging and thoroughly enjoyable Hope. They’re a metal band who have been around for a while, apparently (for as much as I love metal, you could write a couple fat encyclopedias about what I don’t know), and they have a varied sound that draws from death metal, doom metal, hardcore, and the increasingly ill-defined “metalcore” / “post-hardcore” continuum. They remind me a lot of the Ocean collective, in that they move between clean, gruff and shouted vocals as best suits the mood of the music, they know how to move between loud and soft parts of a song with actual dynamics, and they have a nice balance between melody, low-end chug and more prog notions of extended composition and weird sounds. They’re maybe not as ambitious as The Ocean, but I don’t get the sense they’re trying to be.

If you’ve ever heard a doom metal or death metal record, there’s nothing really surprising here, and folks looking for especially raw or harsh sounds should probably look elsewhere. In the unhurried way in which they play their songs and the confidence with which they do so, they remind me of Opeth, without succumbing to Opeth’s sometimes over-precious songwriting (but also without Opeth’s sometimes stunning grasp of structure). The only thing really unusual about them is their easy confidence and the grace with which they put their compositions together, but that’s a pretty big deal in my world. It’s often a goal but rarely realized. I’m going to have to seek out more of their work.