Swallow the Sun absolutely kicked ass with their first demo in 2003 and were totally hyped by various media. In 2007 their debut album “Hope” was released.
Properly produced and played solidly the debut was #3 in the Finnish album charts. As everyone knows the Finnish are a bit more open-minded and keen to experiment in terms of music than we stubborn Germans. And what kind of music do the Finns listen to mainly? Right, Finnish. Although the lyrics on “Plague of Butterflies” are in English, the album has a certain dark and gloomy touch. One notices simply that the music must come from the Scandinavian corner. The album consists of only one track that lasts about 35 minutes and is split into 3 parts. Maybe this ‘solution’ should facilitate the coherent dramatic composition of loneliness and nature, which is publicized in the lyrics, but the three parts polarize against one another. There are changes between vocals that remain of Vintersorg and deep, slow growls that pass into clean vocals. Obviously it’s doom metal but it just won’t spark. There’s simply too much partly predictable confusion. Clean vocals are accompanied by simple riffs and double bass, the growls work together with riffs that are commemorative of doom and a lot of breaks follow. However, among the screams the instruments are most widely withheld. Everything is very foreseeable and there isn’t much alternation offered. Another part of the track is realized like a ballad and the first song – even the whole album - ends with melancholic growls. In the following four songs, the demo of 2003 was processed in a new way. Interestingly the tracks offer the hoped-for variety and dynamics.
The song “Out of this Gloomy Light” is a beautiful morbid and melancholic piece, which captivates the listener with its brilliant adaptation and its stone-cold atmosphere. Because of the fact that I’m not able to evaluate an album on the basis of a demo that I’ve already reviewed it only reaches upper middle-class. Too bad, would “Out of this Gloomy Light” have been pursued in a more consequent way this album should have become a real doom masterpiece.

Metalmagazin