Review Summary: Finnish tick, Melodic tick, Death tick, Metal triple tick
The name As The Sun Falls has come up over and over in melodeath circles since their Swiss inception, but not until now have they registered a broadside quite like their new (breakout) album “Songs From The Veil”.
Headed up by songwriter Jani Berney Mikkänen (guitars, backing vocals) and rounded out by Joni Hakulinen (vocals), Juuso Laitinen (guitars) and Anttoni Välimaa (drums), the band has since returned home to Nummela, Finland for love, both Mikkänen’s spousal union with Gogo Melone (of Aeonian Sorrow) and the country that lives and breathes dark melodic metal.
True to the Finnish way, “Daughter Of The Air” abstracts the seafaring folklore of Ilmatar on a raging sea “toward Ukko” into a thunderous opening statement. Coincidentally similar stylistically to the recent Cnoc An Tursa record, but much more closely aligned musically with heavyweights Insomnium and Wolfheart, “A Shimmer On The Tides” introduces their robust but fluid guitar tone that underpins the best cuts on “Songs From The Veil”. This is the way.
Three full lengths into a very promising career, As the Sun Falls are already astute at building drama into the fabric of their melodic death metal with their connection to nature a longstanding focus, “The forest awakes the hunters and the prey, As Night Devours the pines”.
Whilst the band is adept at winding balladry in the mountaintop “A Million Stars Ashine”, they are better served by the uptempo and dynamic “Below a Pale Tree”, complete with Hakulinen’s most guttural delivery. Or better still, combine the two as achieved in the following “9 Days of Sorrow”. Dual acoustic guitars and harmonized cleans sweep in the Nordic melancholy before heavier chords accentuate the misery.
Cameo vocals from Gogo Melone provide a fascinating postscript to “Silent Waters”, with Melone interestingly providing the album’s prelude in the form of the album art. The nod to Finnish icons Amorphis aside, “Silent Waters” taps into every burgeoning melodeath instinct and shows their ambition is well-founded. Guitar signatures in the broodier “Blood To The Soil” give it ample demarcation to flow into rapids of “Sielulintu”, the closer very much a partner track that sees As The Sun Falls finally making a mark - if not a crater, in the melodic death metal landscape.
