OneMetal.com REVIEW:
Katatonia – Night Is The New Day

Since their inception in 1992, Katatonia have evolved from their early, gothic blackened-doom thrashings to one of the contemporary music scene’s most unique and fascinating bands, evolving so far beyond their roots and even beyond the realms of traditional genre categories that they defy description. Since 2001’s outstanding Last Fair Deal Gone Down (at the time Katatonia’s most brazenly experimental, laid-back album), the band got in touch with their heavier side once more with the following offerings, the more riff-based Viva Emptiness and The Great Cold Distance albums. Their eight studio album, Night Is The New Day, finds the band not only finding a balance between the dark, chunky heaviness of the previous two albums and the more fatalistic indie-rock leanings of Last Fair Deal Gone Down, it also sees them going beyond the confines of either style and creating an expansive, engrossing work that combines doom metal underpinnings with ethereal synths, sublime melodicism and a sweeping, epic scope.

The album kicks off with ‘Forsaker’ in a way that will be instantly recognisable to fans of Katatonia’s last two efforts – thunderous drumming and heavy, rhythmic riffing, followed by clean guitar, languid bass and Jonas Renkse’s by-now iconic vocal style – smooth, mournful and plaintive. The track continues in the same vein, exploiting the quiet verse/loud chorus dynamic that Katatonia have mastered over the years to good effect. Second track, ‘The Longest Year’, starts to show the progression in the band’s sound more obviously – electronic drum loops, pulsing but unobtrusive programmed bass, synth-based atmospherics all joining with Fredrik Norman and Anders Nystrom’s driving yet understated riffage. It’s around here that the contribution made to the album by keyboardist Frank Default begins to make its presence felt. It’s on the third track, ‘Idle Blood’, that we really start to become aware of the stylistic strides forward the band have made. Acoustic guitar, gorgeous string melodies, folk influences and Renkse’s best vocal performance to date driving a track that brings to mind comparisons with Opeth’s acoustic/prog album Damnation.

The whole album, in fact, brings to mind similarly experimental bands without sounding derivative of any one of them. Throughout the album, I kept thinking of Porcupine Tree’s futuristic prog-pop, or Pink Floyd’s icy, spare melodicism. The hook-filled melodies of The Cure’s Disintegration similarly came up as a mental point of reference – but rather than simply appropriating elements of those bands’ sounds and clumsily shoehorning them into the traditional Katatonia template, elements of folk, prog, electronica, metal and rock have been assimilated completely into one of the finest works of the band’s career. When a forthright, aggressive metal track like ‘Liberation’ or the doom-laden misery of ‘Nephilim’ can sit comfortably on the same album with the likes of shamelessly proggy ‘Onwards To Battle’ (complete with lead guitar/synth dual harmony section), you know the band have to be doing something – well, a hell of a lot of things – completely right.

Bottom Line

Katatonia's finest work to date - an album staggering in both its ambition and its accessibility, showcasing beauty and despair in equal measure.