A two-man outfit from Italy, Valkiria specialise in gothic rock/doom, with a light and airy Mediterranean feel worked in alongside the leaden gloom. They’ve borrowed heavily from classic Katatonia over their past full-lengths, and this influence is still very apparent on new release ‘Here the Day Comes’.
The album starts out pretty strongly. ‘Dawn’, makes for a convincing intro, weaving slow and smouldering doom riffs full of sorrow around melancholy, shoegazey swells. ‘Sunrise’ meanwhile employs a riff that is almost identical to that of Katatonia’s ‘Murder’, the track’s Brave Murder Day-isms merged with both fragments of brooding melodic doom and the bittersweet, yearning rhythms and delicate introspection of subsequent album ‘Discouraged Ones’. It’s highly derivative but the doom adds something new, and the atmosphere and feeling are spot on. Third track ‘Morning’ starts off very promisingly too; a careful balance of forcefulness and restraint, with the wounded drive of ‘Saw You Drown’ and just a tinge of BM, but the song seems to lose its urgency midway through, signalling the point at which the remainder of the album loses much of its focus and impact.
Subsequent songs are still consistently solid, full of melancholy gothic rock grooves, gentle clean passages and mournful doom riffs polished to a fine sheen, but they tend to suffer from a certain aimlessness, meandering about in a way that is enjoyable but often leans towards the mundane. Proceedings nevertheless remain both atmospheric and highly competent, but there is a sense of a spell being broken; of the the feeling just seeming to dry up as the album quickly runs out of steam. Things do fall back into place on occasion, such as when ‘Sunset’ spirals down into a beautifully brooding and dejected groove, but generally speaking the latter part of the album is lacking in the momentum and direction of the opening songs, not helped either by the employment of a fade-out on almost every track. The album feels lacking in structure, and increasingly doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The tracks are broken up into different segments of the day, from Dawn and Sunrise through to Evening and Night, but sadly nothing meaningful is done with this concept, with no real narrative to speak of running through the album.
Though overstretched at 40 minutes, in its finest moments ‘Here The Day Comes’ moves me far more than anything Katatonia have put out in the last few years, and there is enough quality material here to make for an excellent, if less than original EP. More than anything though it serves as a reminder of just how good the melancholy Swedes were at their peak.
(6.5/10 Erich Zann)
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