IN MOURNING: “THE IMMORTAL”

(Below you’ll find DGR‘s extensive review of the eagerly awaited new album from the Swedish band In Mourning, released at the end of August by Supreme Chaos Records and Dalapop.)

Over the course of a two-decade-plus career and seven full-length albums, Sweden’s In Mourning have had eras to their overall sound. Considering how varied their overall discography has been, you can still – albeit with stretching that would make your average fitness class jealous – somewhat neatly gather together their releases into historical periods of the band.

The core of their overall progressive death metal sound over the years has been augmented time and time again, resulting in a forlorn and poetic melodeath era of the group that saw full expansion in The Shrouded Divine and Monolith as well as a conceptual, more doom- and post-metal oriented mid-era of their career comprised of albums like The Weight Of Oceans, Afterglow, and Garden Of Storms.

A band having specific historical epochs like this is often reflective of landmark albums and seismic changes to a band’s overall sound – which often follows with releases that run in a similar vein as a band discovers a new path to travel down, either to diminishing returns over time or with a sound that becomes so ingrained with their identity that they’re near inseparable.

photos by Jens Rydén

But In Mourning‘s career is interesting in that they’ve never fully settled into one particular aspect with which to augment their sound. Two or three albums and suddenly they’ll take a wild swing or unleash a sort of unexpected stylistic shift that rejuvenates their music. In that sense it would be forgivable to imagine that The Bleeding Veil was a new high mark for the band and that In Mourning were going to spend their next albums in the epic-melodeath world that they had drawn up for that album.

This is where we stand when we knock on the door of the group’s newest album The Immortal, which interestingly enough both is and isn’t quite that. The mirrors which we gaze through to see album’s reflections of the being that is The Immortal are in themselves surprising, because the one previous work that seems to be coming more clearly into focus is one of the group’s more underrated albums, and one that it’s exciting to hear them return to, if not just because In Mourning haven’t had this level of ‘get up and go’ in some time — and that is their 2010 release Monolith.

Now we are of course on record as thinking In Mourning’s previous release The Bleeding Veil was pretty goddamned good – it even made a year-end list or two around here – but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the band themselves are in the business of making direct followups. In Mourning albums tend to have a habit of creating some distance between them, with no guarantee which side of the group’s genre descriptors are going to get more weight than others.

The Bleeding Veil was an impressive, folk-inflected bit of progressive melodeath that had moments alternating between epic highs and post-metal drifting. The triplet of guitarists have learned to put in a lot of work in both exploring different genres and providing room to breathe, especially with both vocalist Tobias Netzell and Björn Petterson tag-teaming the vocal front with a hefty growl, a light singing voice, and a harsh yell that sounds as if it could cause actual pain.

This sort of musical attack has become the band’s calling card, but again, how they use it differs from disc to disc. For instance, we never would’ve guessed The Immortal was going to be more overt about the storytelling aspects of the band’s music, in the vein of discs like Afterglow and Garden Of Storms, yet this is an album that once again submerges us in prog-rock ephemera for gorgeous songs like “Song Of The Cranes”, the clean-sung middle checkpoint “Moonless Sky”, and “The Sojourner”.

The surprising aspect of this release, then, are the moments of both immense heaviness and groove that’ve worked their way back into In Mourning’s sound – as if they sought to split the difference between Monolith and The Bleeding Veil. The dynamics of this release have the band constantly building to both epic moments within each track and epic songs overall. The closing few of this release will easily surprise as they move from one bombastic moment to the next. The opening of “Staghorn” alone could be enough to power a listener through the last few songs.

There, In Mourning effectively devastate the quiet peacefulness of its immediate predecessor with one of the heavier double-bass-roll grooves they’ve broken out in some time. It’s a sudden adrenaline shot for the last three songs, all of which contain their own moments of soaring hugeness. “Staghorn” is blast-heavy and fast, “North Star” favors a massive groove that segues into one of the strongest choruses in this album’s bounds – of which there are many sing-song moments – and “The Hounding” is a gigantic closing number in line with other In Mourning releases, save for the larger than life segment wherein the band seem to take flight and sail above the clouds to send this release home.

In Mourning albums have a habit of hijacking your listening time like no other, and The Immortal is no different. If anything, it should’ve been expected, as this has been the pattern for the post- and prog-death crew since the days of their first few releases. In Mourning have mastered the art of becoming painterly with their music, their albums either drifting through an overall conceptual arc or maintaining dreamlike qualities to them, such that in moments of absolute heaviness In Mourning are still delivering a story rather than an awesome section to headbang along to.

With phases of the band that’ve ranged from goth-metal-tinged to straightforward melodeath to attempts at poetry in song form as they evolved into their current post-metal and progressive death metal form, In Mourning have consistently been a quality project. The Bleeding Veil and The Weight Of Oceans set immensely high watermarks for the band to have to clear over the years, but thankfully it seems as if the past couple of albums of ‘refining sound and experimentation’ time has been condensed, because by not attempting to be a direct continuation musically of either of those releases The Immortal is able to stand entirely on its own and sounds damned good doing so.

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