Insomnium

I recently discovered a particularly good death metal band. I like using the word "discovered". It makes me feel like I was feeling my way through a long-dead Egyptian tomb beneath some eroded pyramid and found Insomium lying there in the dust. I also like the phrase "particularly good" because it's the kind of sweeping overgeneralization I generally dislike.

So let me rephrase. I recently happened to hear of a death metal band named Insomnium that I happen to like an awful lot. Better?

Thus far they've released three albums - "In The Halls Of Awaiting", "Since The Day It All Came Down", and "Above The Weeping World." The band does not get particularly high marks on www.bnr.com, which it describes as (and this is not a direct quote) good but not highly original. And maybe that's true, but there's something about this band's style that appeals to me very much.

Their first album, "In The Halls Of Awaiting", seems to me to be pretty deeply influenced by Swedish melodic death metal of the Gothenburg type. The album brings to mind Dark Tranquility or In Flames, depending on the song, but even then, the approach isn't straight imitation. For one thing, Insomnium's lyrics make sense to me, after a fashion. I enjoy Dark Tranquility a great deal, but when I look up their lyrics on www.darklyrics.com, the words still make no sense to me. Insomnium's lyrics are considerably more poetic, though since they are probably translated from Finnish there are places where the lyric flow gets a little lost. Plus one hears here and there on the album doom metal influences - it is in places much slower and more somber than conventional death metal, and there is thankfully next to none of that Florida school drum-pounding business.

Their second album, "The Day It All Came Down", is even better. The Gothenburg death metal influence is still there, but the doom metal influence is much stronger. The pace is slower, the mood is more somber, and the lyrics continue to be epic and poetic. "The Daughter Of The Moon" is particularly good, half death metal and half doom metal and all good. The parts with the slow whispered lyrics send chills down my spine. Some of the songs show more Gothenburg influence and others show more doom influence, but taken as a whole, the album is an excellent listen, somber and atmospheric without being sappy.

I haven't heard their third album all the way through yet, so I have to withhold comment, but what I've heard so far sounds pretty good, the same nice mix of melodic death and doom, stylistically similar to the second album, and just as polished.

There are certain tropes in death metal that fatigue me. One is the "brutality arms race" where the quality of the music is apparently proportional to the brutality of the lyrics. Though is is mostly a feature of American death metal, the Scandinavians aren't above this sort of thing either. (And let's face it, Scandinavia is the real home of death metal). I shall cite as my example Dismember, which isn't bad musically. It sounds like grindcore filtered through Carcass, with the same characteristic guitar sound that is sometimes called the "electric saw". But the lyrics! If songs like "Skin Her Alive" or "Sickening Art" don't unsettle you, you just aren't paying attention. They're brutal for the sake of being brutal, though cynics could argue that since the vocals are indecipherable anyway, they might as well be using a grocery list for lyrics. There are worse examples, but the point is that some bands seem to be brutal and disgusting just for the sake of being brutal and disgusting, an arms race of tastelessness that after a while I grow weary of (though I should point out there are bands that as a matter of deliberate practice parody this tendency by being outrageously, heroically tacky).

The other main trope is Satanism, often ridiculously over-the-top Satanism that is clearly intended to sell albums to self-hating teenagers who think Satanism will provide answers to questions like "How come nobody likes me?" This is such a defining trait of black metal that you almost can't have black metal that doesn't mention Satanism in some way, but it also exists in some forms of death metal, most notably the stuff that comes out of Florida (and yes, I'm thinking of Deicide).* I grow weary of this sort of nonsense pretty quickly, and no, it isn't because the Satanic point of view shakes my beliefs - it takes more than tattooing an upside-down crucifix on your forehead to "challenge my beliefs". I'm just readily fatigued by the way they use Satanism as a crass marketing tool. This is why I don't listen to Deicide or black metal acts like Dimmu Borgir, because the shameless exploitation of their ingrained Satanism just wears me down.

It is against this background that I find Insomnium especially pleasing. It's extreme metal, make no mistake, but extreme metal of unusual musical sophistication and highly unusual lyrical taste. Instead of extolling the dubious virtues of brutality, violence and schlock blasphemy, Insomnium is much more subtle. The prevailing mood is somber rather than violent, with most of the songs being about loss, longing and regret rather than hacking people apart with medical instruments or sacrificing black chickens to Satan. The mix of death metal and doom metal is very sophisticated and atmospheric, and I frankly can't get enough of it. It isn't uplifting music that makes one want to dance and sing the way Bowling For Soup does. (Yes, my droogies, I like Bowling For Soup a lot too.) But as a slice of atmospheric, somber, and very advanced and sophisticated doom/death metal, Insomnium seems pretty hard to beat.

(I have to be careful with terms like "doomdeath metal" because there is already a class of music known as doomdeath, which includes bands like My Dying Bride. Insomnium isn't as doomy as doomdeath metal, but it isn't as deathy as death metal. So what is it? It's good, that's what it is!)

*There is a genre of black metal, usually from Norwegian bands, that is anti-Christian but not Satanic. This genre is sometimes called "Viking metal" because it isn't clear that it can be black metal without being Satanic.