A SWARM OF THE SUN

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8.0

• Band:
  A SWARM OF THE SUN
• Duration: 01:11:16
• Available from: 06/09/2024
• Label:

• Pelagic Records

Streaming not yet available

The Swedish duo A Swarm Of The Sun have few terms of comparison even in the varied universe of approaches and contaminations that characterize the international post-metal scene, thanks to a commendable path made of albums built with originality and meticulous patience.
Starting from a debut (“Zenith”) indebted to the sound of Cult Of Luna but softened by a taste for melody that has never disdained alternative rock (“Refugee”, “I Fear The End”), Erik Nilsson (former vocalist of Faithful Darkness) and Jakob Berglund have progressively refined their style, eliminating with each new work elements that characterized the previous one; this work of continuous subtraction led to the more rarefied “The Rifts”, and later to “The Woods” (2019), which denied the song form in favor of three long fragments placed halfway between Mono's “Hymn To The Immortal Wind” and the inconsolable melancholy of Nick Drake.
“An Empire”, released five years after their previous work, draws on past experiences, completing the maturation of the project and signing what is, in the opinion of the writer, if not the masterpiece of A Swarm Of The Sun, at least the most complete (and successful) chapter of their history.
The album opens with “This Will End In Fire”, a solemn organ drone supporting a poignant melody, worthy of the most inspired Ben Frost: seven minutes of apnea, waiting for the flames to really come; they arrive with “Heathen”, a suite that in the first part could belong to the repertoire of the most experimental Talk Talk, with a placid piano pace under whose skin a tension of feedback and keyboards is grafted, to then blaze up in the second phase, in a progressive electric saturation of rare intensity.
As in the previous “The Woods”, each song seems to claim the right to use all the time necessary for its development: so it is not surprising that the single chosen to present the album is “The Pyre”, eighteen minutes in which a dark folk ballad, worthy of Current 93 and Aerial Ruin, swells with gothic-doom atmospheres and then lets a groove of obsessive rhythms and reiterated chords deform it as if it were a piece by Swans from “The Seer”.
The title track emerges from the fade-out of such a complex suite, bringing the album back to the path of the singer-songwriter, the one with the suffering pace of Nick Cave's “Ghosteen” and the depressed singing of Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse), while in “The Burning Wall” you can hear the Smashing Pumpkins' “Gish”, certainly, but exhausted, sitting down to describe the flashes of a battle without ever the will to intervene.
The album finally closes the curtain with a second suite, “Anthem”, less engaging than “The Pyre”, but still fascinating, which starts in a rarefaction capable of recalling the most experimental works of David Sylvian (“Approaching Silence”) and subsequently succumbs to an epic crescendo of keyboards and percussion.
“An Empire” is therefore for A Swarm Of The Sun a point of arrival and at the same time the opportunity for a different path, and this is also reflected in the sensations experienced while listening: on the one hand the melancholic suspicion that this could be the last album that can be classified (albeit with many distinctions, as will be clear from the musical references scattered throughout the text) within the metal category, on the other the awareness of being in front of a mature work, a project aware of its own potential.
An album, in short, that deserves a deep, careful and, above all, unprejudiced listen.