Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterful, April 28, 2002
By now you may have already run across the acclaim this album is getting and are already itching to get your hands on it. Allow me to give you the added incentive to hurry and do just that because the raving praise this album has garnered thus far from critics elsewhere is justly deserved. Now, here is my own breakdown.
GREEN CARNATION's inception into the Metal community was not a good one from my vantage point. Their first release reeked of directionless confusion and dulled me into the next dimension. Had I walked away and ignored the band after that first release I would have truly missed out on one of the most majestic Metal releases in, well, decades really. Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness is quite nearly this decade's answer to PINK FLOYD's The Wall of the1970's. Not surprisingly that comparison transcends not just the 25 or so years separating those two releases and the obvious genre difference but the atmosphere this album carries with it is at times not too far from that established by PINK FLOYD in their heyday. The album is one track. That's right - one song. Well, truthfully its really several songs that have been amalgamated into one but there are several seamless transitions that create the illusion of one long and journeyed composition. The only problem I had with this is that I can't advance to sections of the song because all cd players will read this as one track at 60 minutes plus. Not a problem when you consider that you'll be absorbed for the majority of your listen anyway. This is what makes this release so incredibly good - the sheer captivation of your senses. The album begins with haunting synthesization and the innocent ramblings of a playful child (band leader Tchort's son in fact). As the slow drumming steps in and the album begins its lengthy journey the mood is immediately set and the emotion begins flowing at once. Because there are so many differing elements to this album its too time consuming and cumbersome to cover every transition but suffice it to say that the fluidity of this album is startling. Waves and crests of emotive strings and keys and the backdrop of an enormous ensemble of guest musicians (numbering around 30 or more including a children's choir and opera choir) create an epic and majestic musical portrait of the deepest scope. While there is heavy emphasis on supportive elements on this album let one not forget that this is a Metal album above all things. Heavy guitars drive and steer this beast across its many landscapes of emotional depth with the listener riding the steady wave of triumph and tragedy, sorrow and consolation, that the album seems keenly geared toward building. Its a towering success. Deep into the album there are some bizarre experiments with female chants, which while adding a very odd and eclectic quality, are perhaps a bit too overbearing in length but they add a chill to your spine and alter the mood once again. Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness is a dark album when you step away from it and view (or hear as it were) it from a perspective of totality. However, to call this simply Doom Metal is criminal. This is so much more and genre classification is completely defied. Allow me to call it Ambient/Doom/Epic/Orchestral Metal. Actually that doesn't do it justice and its likely you won't be able to label this with anything currently in the Metal subgenre arsenal. Its just too far out. GREEN CARNATION have created an album that rocks, that saddens, that nurtures, that gives hope then takes it away, that weeps and then dries the tears with breezes of melody. I picture this musical tapestry as a succession of hills and valleys with changing weather patterns and an endless horizon. So yes, its really good see? A few notes. No death growls, just clean singing and well done too. If I had to name band's for comparison I couldn't do it save for the aforementioned PINK FLOYD mention and I think if PINK FLOYD were a Metal band this is probably the direction they'd pursue. I'm tempted to bring OPETH into the equation but not even OPETH have tried anything this bold and artistic to date. Truly this is just GREEN CARNATION. And that folks, is brilliant. This is mandatory. That's all - mandatory. Its also one of the top 5 releases of 2001 and might just go down as one of the top 5 of the past two decades. Now go get it, bring it home, turn down the lights, listen and dream....
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreamlike, ingenious, April 14, 2002
In a perfect world I'd have heard of this album months ago and bought it the day it was released, so I would not have missed having it for so long. In the vein of A Pleasant Shade of Gray (by Fates Warning), Light of Day, Day of Darkness is entirely _one_ song, filling the album up to about 60 minutes. This is a fantastic, seemingly unheralded album. I don't know who this Tchort guy is or what he's done in the musical world, but I'm convinced he's a talented man. This CD is his baby. "Light of Day, Day of Darkness" plays out in ebbs and flows of aggressive, crunchy metal passages and gorgeous, placid soundscapes, with influences ranging from folk to gothic to ambient to opera. Instrumentation runs the gamut of a traditional metal lineup to a wealth of non-metal ingredients: strings, saxophone, sitar, opera choirs, children choirs. There is a lot of B3 organ which imbues a certain "classic" feel. Needless to say, this is not your run-of-the-mill CD. Listening to this album is a dreamlike experience, even during the heavy moments (of which there are many). When you wake after a dream you try and recall details, and yet they elude memory. The first several listens of "Light of Day, Day of Darkness" are similar. When the album ends for the first time, you try to reassemble seemingly disparate musical threads in your mind, but they are fleeting. It takes many of listens to piece this album together entirely, for the cohesion is deeply hidden. Musical passages lead you on in a haze of multifaceted musical realms united through ingenious arrangements and creativity. Recurring motifs are very subtle, excepting the album's main theme which plays out several times. Often, unity is generated by reusing just a single bar, or reintegrating a 5-note melody on a different instrument. All the transitions are very smooth musically, and they seem more so because this is all happening on one track. (In contrast, the aforementioned A Pleasant Shade of Gray divides itself into 12 tracks to separate sections of the overall "suite" and so the listener can navigate to different parts easily. Dream Theater's recent "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" does the same thing.) Naturally, it's much easier to describe a normal 5-minute -- or even 10-minute -- song than this 60-minute titan. It's just difficult to explain how it all comes together. You have your crunchy metal, and then there's myriad other elements looped around it. Some passages set grandiose string crescendos over pounding drums. Others have acoustic guitar with a delicate keyboard accompaniment. Some parts bring in weird, cosmic synthesizers. A big chunk of the 30-40 minute zone is taken up by misty sonics and a female vocalist singing wordless melodies (at one point she makes a weird fluttering effect with her voice). As the song goes through all these changes, Tchort orchestrates the movements with perfect build-up to heavier moments and skillful withdrawal into quiet passages. The "flow" of the song is just perfect. The nondescript and deadpan vocals of Kjetil Nordhus work _perfectly_ with the overall sound. Outside of this album, I don't think I'd like them. One of those hyper-vibrato/falsetto power metal singers wouldn't have fit, that's for sure. When he sometimes gets drowned out by the metal sections, even this seems to fit within the album's dreamy context. He is not so much a _lead_ part of the music, but another thread in an elaborate tapestry. Some of the metal sections' rhythms come across a bit rigid because the drumming is sometimes amort (a few times I think I could predict the fills), but most of the riffs are heavy and memorable. At about the 16:00 mark, this killer riff comes in but it's only used briefly...too bad, because I liked it. Under this riff, the drumming continues to grow more intense until the heaviness retracts again. Some night, jump in the car, throw Light of Day, Day of Darkness in the CD player, and drive around in the country for an hour. It will be a good experience.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An unparalleled musical journey, October 20, 2002
I must admit, I was a little skeptical of this when I first picked it up. This album comprises a single song that just passes the one-hour mark, and I wasn't sure what to think of that. I figured it might very well be a series of shorter songs, strung together by someone who wanted to write an hour-long song just for the sake of doing so, without the benefit of track breaks. I was wrong.For all its length, "Light of Day, Day of Darkness" never gets boring, never makes you want to skip forward to a later part of the disc. It is clear that this was conceived as a unified whole, and it works very well. The song was composed entirely by Tchort, who used to play bass for Emperor back in the days of "In the Nightside Eclipse," but those looking for black metal will have to look elsewhere. This song is as emotional as it is atmospheric, and has a surprising level of diversity. It runs the gamut from crushing heavy metal riffs to operatic vocals that wouldn't be out of place in the score of an epic film. This is beautiful music, and something that requires you to pay attention through several listens to pick up on everything that's going on. I'm not exactly sure how to categorize this. It's one of those albums that defies traditional genre boundaries, and that's part of what makes it so interesting. After about a dozen listens through this one, I think I can safely say that it's one of the best metal releases so far this year. Buy it without hesitation.
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