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Katatonia: The Great Cold Distance Alternative Rock, Hard Rock Peaceville Records March 13th, 2006
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Review
If Opeth were to record a rather generic mainstream alternative rock album, while keeping some doom and gloom ambience in the mix, then you would have the latest musical incarnation that is The Great Cold Distance by Katatonia. For those who are new to the band through the success of this release, this band has changed their style along the road from a Doom and Death metal sound, and slowly trudged their way towards a sound like this. However, the sound on the previous release, Viva Emptiness didn't even really signal the coming of this rather abominant album that really just spits in the faces of their die hard fans. The Great Cold Distance is a dark hard rock album that mainstream radio stations would probably play if it weren't for the band's musical background prior to this release. Much of the album is just some typical, simple guitar chords and drumming, with clean sung vocals, and a lot of studio enhancements such as random echoing vocals that were just sung, as well as some random light industrial-esque sound effects in the background thanks to some programming done. "Leaders" starts the album off decent enough, being a decent song with a bit more bite to it then anything else on here. Then "Deliberation", the latter of the singles off this album, kicks in, and that is about where all hope is lost. Sadly, The Great Cold Distance doesn't really hold much else to it other then what you will find on this song. So, now the question is, with this big a change towards a generic and generally widely accepted hard rock sound blended with some doom metal-like ambience, is the album even any good? It'd be a lie to sit here and say that this release is the farthest thing from enjoyable. The overly simple music and vocals makes many of the tracks on here really catchy. "My Twin" and "July" are two of the singles off the album, and even though the songs are perhaps the most generic, and even whiniest songs you'll hear, they will stick in your head with how tight and catchy the song is. "Consternation", however, starts off promising, but quickly turns into something that sounds like a project between Tool and Opeth. It's not a bad song, but at the same time, it's not that good either. You can also hear hints of what would sound like late Silverchair throughout the album. Aside much of what seems to be fodder on this album, the track "Rusted" starts off great, but by the end of the song you just want it to end as it starts to feel a bit too stretched out. This is where the album starts to get a little better. "Increase" is a decent track, and "July" stands out as much as "My Twin" does, but it's the slower, more keyboard oriented "In The White" that really shows what the album could have been had the band focused moreso on the Doom metal aspect they are known for. This carries over into "The Itch", just minus the keyboards. The Great Cold Distance is far from a doom inspired hard rock masterpiece. The generic guitar riffs and some of the in studio editing abuse found on this CD really cause many of the songs on here to just sound flat out bland and uninspired. However, there are a few solid, catchy songs on here worth checking out, and, aside "My Twin", all of them appear at the end of the release. The Great Cold Distance is worth a listen, but definitely not worth the value to own it, since there's only three, maybe four songs on this release that will have you iffy about selling it off if you do, for some reason, decide to purchase this.
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