I haven’t heard of the band Swallow The Sun, but what I do know is that I like this 3 album set titled “Songs from the North” which appropriately are labelled part I, II and III. The type of metal that is being played here is Doom Metal, which despite it’s similar name to Death Metal, sounds and feels completely different from what you would expect. While Death is all about speed, hard and melodic technical riffs and course vocal work, Doom is essentially the opposite of that; slowing down the speed, almost to a walking or pacing drum tempo with long and atmospheric prog-rock riffs. Vocal work that almost feels like a incantation or wizard/pagan ritual-like slow death growls and heavy use of other instrumentals and ambience sound.

I’ve tried to listen to a number of Doom Metal bands in the past and honestly they are pretty boring to me, although I do find some bands such as Meadows End which are kind of a hybrid death-doom style really good, incorporating the best aspects of both sub genres. Swallow the Sun on the other hand has none of that, it’s pure atmospheric Doom Metal and it’s really good. It just feels very epic and well, doom-ish, like it’s the apocalypse and the last survivors are mourning the loss for the end of the world. Fucking songs are extremely long, shortest is like 5 minutes, longest is like 14 minutes. Works for doom I guess. What’s with the cover though, some pagan looking woman druid-ing it up? Not exactly what anyone would expect for a metal cover, let alone Doom metal. With a title named “Songs from the North” I had viking or some wizard rituals in mind with like winter scenes and shit, guess not everyone likes vikings.

You need to be in a certain state of mind when listening to Doom Metal, kinda like not giving a shit and yet you let the music play. It’s pretty good when you are working on something steady because the tempo is so slow but still metal, you can concentrate on other things. Like in total there are 21 songs out of this 3 part album and I can’t name a single song track because they all sound the same and each song blends in with one another. It’s a good change but you seriously can’t listen to this all the time, you’ll get bored or go insane, probably want to kill yourself, guess that’s why it’s called “Doom” metal I guess.

Score: 7.5