Swallow the Sun – Plague of Butterflies

{mosimage}Finnish doom phenomena are back holding hands with Spinefarms Records and bringing an unusual new album.

Certainly this Plague of Butterflies is not the usual doom studio album that you could expect from many other bands. The main “corpus” of the work is an unique track of more than 30 minutes divided into 3 movements: Losing the Sunsets, Plague of Butterflies and Evael 10:00. This starts to have more sense when you realize that the project was composed originally for a ballet (yeah baby, doom ballet…) and after the cancellation, it became part of this new studio album that gets completed with 4 more bonus tracks from the first period of the band, for scoring a total playing time of a bit more than 1 hour.

Even when the Finnish musicians put a lot of effort into this product, I am not sure if even their hardcore fans will be able to swallow this “pill”. Dark melodies, decadent sounds and some cutting riffs trademark of the band are very present here, but I am still not convinced of the vocal skills of Mikko. I do not think he has the charisma enough to lead the band with sense, and in the end, after a few minutes, you can feel kind of lost (or bored) with such a long and “never-ending” track.

Probably if you would hear the track in the right context, as the original soundtrack it was supposed to be, the result could be different, but just like this looks like a dead material that had to be released in one way or another, so the final result is weak and without harmony.

Rating 2/5.