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Katatonia: Night Is The New Day Depressive Hard Rock, Doom Metal Peaceville Records November 2nd, 2009
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Review
Following their insanely successful full-length album The Great Cold Distance, Katatonia unleash their eigth studio album, Night Is The New Day. This album, a much more solid attempt from the band, is an album that fans of the band's more recent work will not be displeased by. But, when you really examine Katatonia's more recent material, it just doesn't seem to all be there and winds up being a rather big let down. As on the group's previous effort, will Night Is The New Day suffer from the same constraints to, once again, meet commercial success? Well, yes, Night Is The New Day is definately a much more matured album then the band's previous. The material on here doesn't truly deviate from the original blue print set back on The Great Cold Distance, but in essence just has more power behind it and is rather impressive musically. That's not to say that some of this album doesn't sound like other material you've already heard, whether on this release or in the past. "The Longest Year" is an entertaining track, however you can clearly hear shades of the band's former single "My Twin" right from the start, and "Day and Then the Shade" is easily one of the better tracks off the album with it's more straight forward Hard Rock track that has a energetic sound that stands out from all the rest of the material on here. "Forsaken" is a good track, but it's nothing all that impressive, especially against some of the other tracks on here that really set a dark and poetic feel to the album. Once you hit "Idle Blood", everything really does start to pick up, with the only real exceptions being "Liberation" and "The Promise of Deceipt" which really just don't have the same strength behind them that much of this release has. As far as the enjoyable material on this release goes, there's actually a good dose of entertaining material that will hook by the time of "Idle Blood", a very keyboard driven track that acts more as a power ballad that deserves to have the word power in it. "Nephilim" is another track that really shows off the band's musical abilities well. For a good chunk of the album, you're getting ambient-filled Rock with a Metal kick to it until you reach this point, where the band out of nowhere decided to take their music back to their Doom roots. This song is exactly how this and every Katatonia CD should be composed, as it's Progressive nature brings such a raw and powerful Doom element to the mix that really enhances the Rock elements during the slower parts of the song. However, this doesn't mean every song ont he next album should follow this exact same structure, and also should mean the same for this release. Granted there really are not a lot of moments on this release that sound similar to one another and bring an onset of new repetition issues, but sadly there are still moments. While "Nephilim" is an absolutely amazing song, you also have the same type of structure pop up elsewhere. Take "Forsaken" as an example. The track starts up rather heavy with what sounds like a breakdown today's Metalcore acts (such as Between The Buried And Me) would use. Then goes very slow, picks up, goes slow again, following that sort of structure. Now, yes, verse and chorus do change things up, and it would be boring without it, but these tracks are just so obviously close to each other that, while not exactly the same and still notably different, you'd think you were listening to a differently mixed version of the song. When all is said and done, Katatonia has clearly sat down and defined how they want their sound to be, which is a little bit of everything. Throughout the album, you're going to hear the band's new signature sound and ambience, which is great as the band does this part of their job well. But, you will also come across various other elements thrown into the mix, such as the addition of Progressive elements, as well as reverting back to their Doom days and playing with some Trance aspects, such as during "Nephilim" and more obvious on "Inheritance". Even with some of the issues that seem to inhabit the music of this effort, Night Is The New Day is a far superior Katatonia album that starts off rough, but meets a much more enjoyable, pleasant, and rather beautiful melancholic end with "Departure" that makes reference to the previous single "July" without actually ripping that song off. If Katatonia continues to experiment and enhance their music, they will once more become a staple band in the Metal community.
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