ALBUM REVIEW: Contemplations – Soliloquium

Sweden’s SOLILOQUIUM are a band that pays homage to the early days of the death doom scene, whilst simultaneously creating their own sound and making their mark. Taking influence from early PARADISE LOST, OCTOBER TIDE, ANATHEMA and KATATONIA, this band have added their own hints of musical progression in amongst this tried and tested formula, and have gradually developed a sound and style that proves they are one of the better bands within the sub-genre. Their latest full length, Contemplations, builds upon the framework laid down on their 2016 debut, An Empty Frame, and pushes their sound to ever more impressive heights.

The album’s first track, Chains, is a track that couples sublime cleaner tones and a performance tinged with melancholy to great effect. It’s got some imaginative and brilliant guitar lines, peppered liberally with slight progressive flourishes, and some genuinely dense and powerful gutturals that really make this track sound incredible. It moves at a dark, foreboding snails pace and blends the sort of grand, ethereal sound of a band like ANATHEMA with the starkly grimmer and more ferocious stylistic approach of early PARADISE LOST, all tied together with some interesting motifs and a very emotive performance that makes this track a thoroughly enjoyable and catchy opener.

Following hot on its heels, Catharsis proves to be a much more palpable and robust track, with sorrowful, inspired lead guitar hooks, haunting acoustic guitar passages and angelic vocals all combining to create a song that is equal parts bleak and beautiful. With its impressive vocal range, and a similarly varied compositional approach, it’s full to bursting with soaring, atmospheric sections that help keep the track engrossing from start to finish. It’s got the sort of dark and morbid style that is sure to make it a favourite amongst diehard fans and newcomers alike. Streetlights, a markedly shorter offering than the two songs that have preceded it, is easily one of SOLILOQUIUM‘s more progressive moments, and sees them experimenting with discordant melodies and some truly amazing, eclectic drumming that you’re more likely to associate with a band like AKERCOCKE or OPETH than OCTOBER TIDE or KATATONIA. Despite its far softer level of distortion and more measured characteristics, it’s nonetheless a vicious and intense track that makes it stand out in a very different manner to the opening songs.

22, another brief burst of far more minimalistic, gorgeous sounding music, characterised by sweet, glorious guitar lines and similarly smooth and grandiose vocal mannerisms. It’s a far softer and calmer affair than what we’ve come accustomed to at this point, and it does a great job of not only being a great song in its own right, but also breaking the album up and providing a much warmer and manured cadence to proceedings. Unfulfilling Prophecy takes the listener back down route of brooding, austere death doom stylings, with some more of those excellent, utterly tar thick death growls and beefy, visceral guitar hooks coming together and giving us a gloomy yet undeniably monolithic track, sprinkled with some trite, angelic interludes which only serve to punctuate the power and intensity of the motifs that make up the bulk of this particular offering.

For the Accursed is another more acoustic guitar based number, with some incredibly solid melodies and cleaner, almost shoegaze-esque guitar hooks being backed by steady and authoritative drumming. It’s got a great minimalist song style, and this allows SOLILOQUIUM to build a truly epic and captivating atmosphere with this track, relying more on their softer elements to carry the song than a straight froward death doom formula. There are some excellent, sparsely used gutturals that make a great contrast with the tone and approach of the music.

The album’s penultimate offering, In Affect, showcases the band at perhaps their most progressive and experimental. It balances delicately between dense and vicious death doom with jarring, dissonant chords and hooks to much more bombastic moments with soaring vocals and glorious melodies. The sound is so varied, and incorporates so many different ideas and sounds within its five minute play time that it’s hard not appreciate and love it. It’s closing moments have a finality and dark sense of urgency that makes for a great climax.

The eighth and final song, Wanderlust, starts life as a very measured, airy piece of music shrouded in plenty of suspense, before bursting into life and starting in earnest, with an impressive vocal range being on display right off the bat, ranging from hellish shrieks that are far closer to black metal, through to those all too familiar sludgy death growls, and the music itself also takes on a great variety, blending trite melodic flourishes with dense, dark and utterly ferocious grooves. It’s a great way of bringing together all of SOLILOQUIUM‘s many styles and influences that have been on display throughout the album, making this monolithic offering not only one of the album’s high points, but also the one that is perhaps the most typical of their sound, while at the same time throwing in plenty of progressive motifs to add even more flavour to proceedings. It’s a brilliant way to cap off an equally brilliant record.

Contemplations is a truly impressive album from start to finish. The musicianship is incredibly high, the variety of music on offer is genuinely vast and encompasses a lot of different aspects, and the production gives it an absolutely brilliant sound. It has all the hallmarks that made the early death doom scene brilliant, with plenty of emotive gothic and progressive elements thrown in to set SOLILOQUIUM apart from the pack. This proves to be, to date, the band’s magnum opus, surpassing everything they’ve done prior to this and resulting in a serious album of the year candidate in the process. How exactly they will outdo this world class effort is yet to be seen, but whatever comes next will have to be amazing to even be comparable to this brilliant spectacle.

Rating: 9/10

Contemplations is out now via Transcending Records. 

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