The night time is the right time

A grey figure sculpts stoic pathways out of the marble darkness; within, the ever-beating decay where blood and sweat and joy and pain all pulse, longing. For what, that's up to your fevered brain and split soul. Sound, like distance, remains ever cold, yet takes turns shouting and whispering in your ear that you are indeed alive, indeed warm despite the frigid evening rain lashing your face as you breathlessly chart the shadows that steal between streetlamps, that lurk around corners and in ratty concrete, that skim pooling acid tongue to leer through hazy portals and seasons stuck on echo. Still you manage to uncover new ways to glow in the dark, find your way to anywhere but here, a flâneur à l'intérieur.

That most famous of flâneurs, Charles Baudelaire, held in very high esteem by T.S. Eliot, was nonetheless subject to a backhand: his apparatus, by which I do not mean his command of words and rhythms, but his stock of imagery (and every poet's stock of imagery is circumscribed somewhere), is not wholly perdurable or adequate. Those same charges could be rightly extended to these Swedish mood rockers (and every band since the dawn of recording technology, and Thomas Stearns, too, when not busy restocking with stolen goods), for they mine the same earth, explore its every crevice, every unmarked place on that map. Given that this album is a shade more textured, a tone less immediate than her predecessors, will this, despite their masterful craft, prove to be a problem?

A stellar triumvirate opens with black and white oscillation in and about omnipresent, sheet metal riffs, yet Forsaker never abandons its most effective weapon, the voice of Jonas Renkse. I'd wager that there's many a goth band who'd pay through the nose for his services. Next, the match of The Longest Year is struck, breathing in the spaces before the cascade thunders, lines soaring above to spiral black omens until the oxygen burns away, back down to the languid pilot light. Atmospheric in their own idiom, less ambient, more tangibly transient, the evaporating, Opethian condensation of Idle Blood smears a windowpane, the butterflies-in-stomach aftermath of "you claim to be my long absent friend/you are the cancer that just moved in," truly one of the band's most stunning pieces.

Onward Into Battle takes awhile to do so, the quiet less effective, less perfectly formed this time around, until saved by a jazzy syncopation. Perhaps in time it'll blossom as that circular hum trapped before Liberation, blooming in blue, subdued electric fire. The Promise Of Deceit drowns in that same electro-splash before a wall of sound, reminiscent of Dispossession in sludge, debt unpaid, crests over the marching refrain.

With a glorious tip of the fedora to their doom-laden provenance and, yes, those fields, the march slows as the leaden weight of evening gloom pushes ever down, Nephilim shoulders heave and give under an audible bass grind -- this is certainly the band's most three-dimensional record yet -- the soul receives but black skies, a New Night. A stroll alone before struggle springs out of pale red strophes on the back of rippling riffs, filling the head for just a moment until the next neon storefront reflection, whose placid, fluorescent hum works best in headphones, as do the breezes of warning and escape blowing over "our names chalked," the Inheritance that tangles someone else for a change.

But again we wake to Day and Then the Shade, the metronome ticking a bit faster, a keyboard strata à la Last Fair Deal Gone Down layered over propulsive riffing, a definite album blacklight. Dusted Ashen chords strengthen with a second-half, 70s rock backbeat married to a vaguely uplifting harmony line, but those are the two sides of the Katatonia coin, hope and despair, heat and cold colliding, melting to leave us wading through a slushy, virus melancholy. The gracefully drowsy, hypnotic Departer closes and aims to soothe, "I'm so rash compared to you/surrender, it's the path of our lives." Now that's a comfort I can wrap my heart around.

Perhaps needing a bit more time to simmer than past efforts, Katatonia, if not equaling their artistic pinnacle, have presented another darkly shimmering collection of hymns documenting this beautiful sadness that always seems most appropriate when waiting for a late bus in precipitation-soaked sneakers, everything humming a lost, overcast chorus on repeat, repeat, repeat.