A November Death/Doom Metal Attack!

Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Date: Friday, 08.11.2019

Doom metal was made for miserable weather, so it’d be hard to find a touring package better suited to Ljubljana’s current forecast than the one that rolled into Orto bar last Friday. On a rainy Friday evening, a nicely packed Orto welcomed the trio that likes it slow — Oceanwake, October Tide, and Swallow the Sun.

Tonight’s opening act, Oceanwake, were a complete unknown, but after the first few notes it wasn’t hard to guess they were countrymen of the tour headliners. The five-piece hails from Luvia, a small town on the west coast of Finland, and they play exactly what you’d expect from Finns — a melodic blend of death and doom metal draped in a heavy curtain of quintessential Finnish melancholy. For their debut show in Slovenia, Oceanwake focused mainly on their fresh studio album Lights Flashing In Mute Scenery and delivered it with total confidence, though they also came across as fairly generic, offering what we already know in better form from countless other Finnish bands — the interplay of clean and harsh vocals, brutal aggression traded for moments of complete despair, wrapped in wistful, melancholic passages.

The more eagerly awaited act — at least judging by the crowd’s reaction — were the evening’s sole Swedish representatives, October Tide, who had already won people over at Metaldays 2019, where they played the festival’s first day and delivered a masterclass in quality death/doom metal. Tonight was no different, except that in the more intimate atmosphere October Tide came through with even greater impact. The band is made up of seasoned veterans of the Swedish scene — their combined résumé includes names like Katatonia, Dellamorte, Centinex, and Demonical (for the latter, vocalist Alexander Högbom recorded the very strong recent album Chaos Manifesto). Those names make it clear that the Swedes are deeply rooted in death metal, but in October Tide they know how to put the brakes on and crush you with slower tempos too. Sonically they sit somewhere between early Katatonia and Chicago gloom merchants Novembers Doom (who would have been a seasonally perfect fit for this package), though they have enough of their own identity to keep the comparisons from getting too close. What October Tide put front and center is aggression and brutality — there are no clean vocals anywhere in their music — and true to their roots, they lean hard into the death metal side of things. Between the epic riffs and Alexander’s savage growl, October Tide even throws in blast beats for good measure, while the ominous atmosphere builds on massive, monolithic riffs that were a perfect match for Ljubljana’s gloomy, rain-soaked mood — an atmosphere that the closing Adoring Ashes only deepened.

After the Swedes’ outstanding set, Finnish Swallow the Sun had a hell of a task to justify their headliner status. That status was earned on the back of their seventh studio album When a Shadow Is Forced Into Light, released this past January, and its title track was how they greeted the Ljubljana crowd. With its generous helping of clean vocals, slow tempos, and heavy keyboard support, it immediately made clear that Swallow the Sun would be serving up the classic Finnish formula — alternating aggressive passages with the melancholy of eternal darkness. There’s nothing to fault about the band’s performance itself; they’re a tight, top-tier unit and the songs are varied and dynamic. But given their considerable length and coming right after October Tide’s more visceral punch, they made for heavier going, and on this particular night Swallow the Sun’s dreamy quality didn’t hit quite as hard as it usually does. That said, as a package the whole evening was perfectly in tune with the dark, foggy, rain-soaked season that has already settled in around us.

author: Rok Klemše
photos: Nina Grad