Review Summary: Green Carnation's sophomore release is one of the longest songs made ever prior to it's release. Is the pretentiousness of the album itself a detriment to it's quality? Or does it make sense as an overall feature?
I have a recent tendency to like long, really long, unresolving music. Why? Is there a reason why I like really long music for the sakes of it? Or is it that I’ve changed my ways of seeing things, now that I’ve changed my transporting habits?.
However it is, I decided I should review Green Carnation’s Light of Day, Day of Darkness. Prior to this, as usual, I doused myself in knowledge about the band, instead of programming like a good engineer. This may lead to believe that my self-deprecating condition for reviewing long albums is, in one word, stupid. Some may remember
Corrupted’s “El Mundo Fr*o” review, and it’s in the same vein of this album. A long, really long experience. Nonetheless the experience, despite being treacherous and rocky, is not similar at all.
Corrupted’s album is based on minimalism mostly, so beauty relies upon making things be tiny, yet different every step of the way. Green Carnation’s focus for the album isn’t this at all.
The sound overall is more filled with ambience, with elements that come out bursting out of the walls, if heard through the right headphones (professional attitude right there people). The song begins, as any other epic-long-pretentious song, building up and resolves to a very impetuous, guitar riff, accompanied by a nice keyboard in the back, sued to add to the musical experience a certain “despair” factor. The first verses end with “Light of Day, Day of Darkness”, which ends a cycle, and enters a tranquil section again, always with drums behind. This section goes quicker to hard-mode, and there’s always a keyboard behind. The second section feels much more “progressive” to say it in a way. There’s a good balance between the heavy and the soft sections, but there are hints of Doom here or there. The riff around minute 18 tells me so, at least, and the heavy riff after the short acoustic section. Other really nice riffs are the one around minute 22, and the subsequent instrumental, the female vocal intervention around minute 33 (with sexy sax and all that jazz), minute 41’s section is pretty beautiful as well, and the solo that follows it… such a great culmination.
The album/song makes a great use of all this sections, since there’s never a single minute left that’s boring. The clean vocals are good, but that’s it. You either love them or hate them. There’s no presence to them. They sound good, in key… but they still feel like they could do a bit more, they don’t necessarily sound bad, just the presence feels… unpleasant. The keyboards, on the other hand are one of my favorite instruments in this albums, because they are not shred-in-your-face-slut kind of importance, but more like adding to the vibe when they are required. The drums are also spot-on, some really nice interesting fills here and there that keep it interesting. Also the section in minute 33 gives the song an interesting turning-point, because it do feels unexpected and is very well achieved. The screaming at minute 36-ish doesn’t sound very pleasant though. Like she couldn’t reach the note… or… I don’t know. The despair is pretty constant and nice. Awful vibrato, though. The progressions in general are very well achieved and don’t feel like separate sections… at least not for the most part. Some parts that are like
Heavy-Silence-Soft do feel a bit out of place, but that’d be nitpicking, it’s pretty nice disregarding that. There’s a section around minute 44 that isn’t all that great, but picks up nicely, going back to the first section. The end of the song is very nice, as well, before the baby speaking and after that. That’s something that makes the whole song round, but I’m trying to figure out the meaning of that… Maybe babies are the light of the world! Oh Surprise! OK maybe no.
The lyrics of the song didn’t impress me at all. The date of the album shows that the lyricist wasn’t really that much used to using the songwriting elements available, and the images, despite being solid are slightly dull:
Doves and birds, grass and trees
Where was all I used to see?
Why am I not
What I used to be?
I see the unseen
I hear the unheard
I learned the secret
But not before I learned
Then again, you can find really nice lines every now and then:
Night divide day, day erase night
Light of day, day of Darkness
In Twilight atmosphere
A silent seductive call
Further read indicates that there are a lot of these really cute, interesting lyrical moments, but I think it’s unnecessary to put them all down here. I think there’s a balance between nice and … cliché, to say it in a way. But for the most part, things come out nicely and there’s a balanced amount of both.
So overall, I can say this is a great album, but nothing more. Some sections are slightly tiring but for the most part do what they have to do when they have to do it, and the vocals are just not my thing. Maybe they are growers, but to be quite honest I don’t want them to grow on me. I’ve heard them long enough and they don’t really work so there you go. >: [
It’s a nice, enjoyable thing to listen to if you like progressive music, but it clearly shows there’s more for this band, and well. Time tells.
