Shadows of the Dying Sun by Insomnium

Insomnium is a progressive death metal band from Finland that have since been competing with the likes Amorphis, Children of Bodom, Nightwish, and Kalmah for popularity in the Finnish metal scene, particularly melodic death metal. They have been around for a while and have made some pretty great albums as well. Their music is very open for interpretation and have meanings, particularly negative, to the works.
As what many people including myself would put in there best of 2014 list, you would expect greatness to come. It truly has with this one. It’s basically anything you would expect from Insomnium multiplied twice fold, and that atmosphere. That atmosphere is nothing short of gloomy and beautiful. Most of the tracks on this album are generally over five minutes and leave you little time for the more, shall I say, extreme and faster stuff in melodic and progressive death metal. Take band’s like Arch Enemy, Disarmonia Mundi(who we talked about recently), Kalmah and even Amorphis as well and you’ll see just what I mean.

Though no track exceeds past eight minutes, there is one track, The River, that almost does. This track starts out with more of a black metal style for the rest of the band and then it seems to just return to form. There are a couple cleans throughout the song and album, but they are, for the most part, relatively sparse nonetheless. Even still, the vocals provide a sort of backdrop for the music to really shine on its own, so I can probably live with it if the vocalist was absent. I find myself getting pretty lost in this doom & gloom type atmosphere and it just makes me want to break down crying almost. If you just feel sad one day or moment, unless you want to express your feelings in music form, I wouldn’t recommend playing this album during that time. Just a thought. It can also make for some good background music for some highly depressing event in a video game or story that you like. It is one of the best heavy metal albums of 2014 and it’s easy to see why.
I give this a 9.5/10. I am the Grim Reaper, signing off.