Swallow the Sun – Songs from the North I, II & III

It’s longer and almost more entertaining than a movie.

To say that releasing a triple album is an amazing feat wouldn’t be giving honest credit to the amount of dedication it takes to do so. For clarity’s sake, this isn’t referencing three albums released in a steady sequence over time, but one grandiose opus delivered in one lengthy package. Finland’s Swallow the Sun have tackled and accomplished such an achievement with this month’s Songs from the North I, II & III.

It’d be a blatant statement bringing into question how long this audio anomaly is, and saying that its run-time is over two and a half hours would be a surprise to literally no one. What also wouldn’t come as a surprise is what Swallow the Sun accomplished in this triad collection. Touching on the despaired doom and death they’ve prototypically made their own, the three parts that comprise Songs from the North I, II & III are in a comparable sense best like the combination of a theatrical play and a great novel. Each CD corresponds to the classic “three-act” or three part story structure, with a beginning or “setup,” a middle or “confrontation” phase and a concluding ending or “resolution.”

Acting as the first stage of the introductory sequence to I, II & III is “With You Came the Whole of the World’s Tears,” which establishes how I is essentially the best of the standard, expected sounds from Swallow the Sun. “With You…” opens with an acoustic riff and lead singer Mikko Kotamäki reciting what sounds like the beginnings of a dark love poem. “Saint Peter, save me and send me down to hell / For I will find her there, where moonlight catches her scarlet hair / Where she sings, and black ravens circle above her in the burning air.” A song of sacrifice, the lovelorn expressed in “With You…” seems to lyrically continue on into the doom driven “10 Silver Bullets,” whose chugging riffs make it one of the harder tracks on the first disc.

With II, a pertinent switch in tempo makes it the slower, folkier goth rock sounding of the three discs. Kotamäki exchanges his usual hard-hitting screaming for a more melodic and harmonized approach to singing, with no brash tones present anywhere. Much of this disc relies on its instrumentalism (opening track “The Womb of Winter” and the coordinated “66°50’n, 28°40’e” are solely instrumental), which makes for a chilling, Poe-esque album that acts as an appropriate middle part.

The final disc, III, defines funeral doom in its capacity for blending the high points of the prior two discs as a fitting resolution to the set. Yet, after the 42 minutes of down tempo dreariness that preceded it, making it through this final stretch proved more difficult. Its heavy and at times considerably earsplitting (“Lost & Catatonic” possesses some serious blast beats AND shrill screams), but not enough to awaken the sleepy state II presented to the listener.

Looking at Songs from the North as a whole, it has its ups and downs, its points of emotional vulnerability and points of stringent, unbreakable strength. Making it to the end of this monumental oeuvre will leave you with a visceral, awe-struck outlook of both sadness and amazement. Digesting each of its parts individual will still illicit the same results but doesn’t translate the same appreciation.