(written by Islander)

“There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.”
– Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis”

Those words feature prominently in The Bleak Picture‘s previews of their second album Shades of Life, which will be released by Ardua Music on June 27th. The music will remind you of them, but the music will also inspire other moods and other visions.

The album is a formulation of melodic death-doom metal that is at once earthy and astral, immensely heavy and gossamer light, stricken by sorrow but elevated by expansive visions of splendor, a powerfully immersive, emotionally moving, and often spine-shaking experience from beginning to end. And we are very fortunate to premiere its full stream today. Continue reading »

The image on the cover of the debut album from the Finnish duo The Bleak Picture is striking. It shows a group of people paused in their normal daily movements (except, perhaps, for the police) and staring at a dark hunched figure, or maybe two of them, on the precipice of some catastrophe, lost in either horror or mourning or both. The origins of the devastation are hard to decipher, but the ruination is apparent.

Gazing at the image, it does seem to connect with the title of the album — Meaningless — but the exact nature of the connection, even though it feels right, is as mysterious as the exact nature of the catastrophe in the cover image.

Well, it would have been an interesting question to ask composer/instrumentalist Jussi Hänninen and lyricist/vocalist Tero Ruohonen what that image depicts and why they chose it, but alas, the thought came too late. But maybe it’s for the best, because there are mysteries in the music too — and catastrophes and mourning and something like a search for meaning. Continue reading »