For their third album Jón Aldará replaces original singer Mikko Kotamäki, while the remaining 5 members carry on where they left off, albeit in a slightly more vivacious vein of melodic death metal than their previous releases.
The beautifully cheery piano and acoustic guitar piece for opening track “From The Depths Of Spring” immediately shows that this isn’t going to be a morose album.
Jón quickly shows that is death vocals are deep and powerful on “Howl”, while his clean and melodic vocals have a rather wide range he can employ. Sami Yli-Sirniö and Janne Perttilä manage to get a rather folksy sound out of their guitars which is further embellished by Kasper Mårtenson’s keyboard accompaniment and there’s even a bit of blasting by Marko Tarvonen after Olli-Pekka Laine fills out the sound during a somnolent bridge on his bass.
The delicate tapping on the cymbals builds to a gentle pounding of the skins as the guitars grow in their distorted delivery with the harmonious vocals crescendoing as slow lengthy growls on “Frozen Processions” before fading away to the windswept violin intro of “A Shapeless Derelict”. This is the point where the songs practically double in length and become far more theatrical in their composition with “A Shapeless Derelict” alternation between clean vocals with accompanying piano to death growls over distorted triplets and thrashed drums.
“Set Alight” also begins with minimalistic piano and a simple drum tempo for Jón’s deep baritone to sing over, but once the guitars join in he quickly flicks over to growls before returning to spoken then clean vocals as the guitars subdue their aggression. Then all of a sudden Sami kicks off a lead that has everyone playing at high speed including the Hammond sounding keyboard. They’ve made a pretty video for this one which I’d suggest watching for a taster.
The title track “On Lonely Towers” is the longest on the album, just shy of 12 minutes with the first 2 minutes being rather ethereal before the vocals commence it takes on a very Opethesque grandiose feel. The tempo never increases even though the guitars and keyboards get much, much heavier before they ebb and flow from psychedelic to mellow to heavy as they weave their layers upon each other to form an impressive layer for the lead to colour for the final few minutes of the song.
Quite easily the heaviest song on the album, “Chaos, The Songs Within” still has its share of prog-rock moments to go with the all-out death attack which they do so well.
The final track, “The Vault”, sweeps along through its many movements ranging from sedate acoustic guitar to fast jazzy piano and staccato guitar to slow plodding riffs over drawn out keyboard notes over its 11 minute duration with the vocals going from gently whispered to growled roars and even includes a bass solo. A far more ambient track then fully engaging in some instances, but definitely not lacking in substance when you give it your full attention.
Overall, a great album by a great band. I’m sure there shall be more than a few people lamenting Mikko’s departure, but I think that Jón manages to hold his own and while different isn’t always good, in this instance it’s certainly not bad either.
(8/10 Marco Gaminara)
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