Opening track "Formaldehyde" sets the tone for the rest of the album; opening with a mellow, melodic intro and first couple of verses that lulls the uninitiated into a false sense of security before building to it's climax. What really impressses here is just how natural and unforced they make the transition from nice and relaxing to jarring and disturbing. I am not a fan of those bands who mix many different styles and moods into their music as Madder Mortem do, but then end up sounding like someone flicking between totally unrelated radio stations like they can't make up their mind. Madder Mortem may cover a lot of ground musically, from Jazz Noir to Metal, and they certainly do explore seemingly every nook and cranny of human emotion from impossibly sweet to furious anger, happy and hopeful to melancholy ennui to anguished despair, but they succeed in this by never once ever stopping sounding like Madder Mortem, and not a single change of mood ever sounds forced or abrupt to my ears. Instead, the music ebbs and flows through all of the changes of style, pace and mood in a very natural way. I should also point out that every mood they explore also sounds very genuine, the sweet does not prompt a search for a sick bag, neither does the angry sound like a teenager's tantrum as is too often the case. Madder Mortem make everything that they do sound so effortless that it is easy to forget just how much more common it is for other bands trying to do what they do to fall flat on their face in the attempt.

The most obvious weapon in their arsenal is vocalist Agnete M. Kirkevaag, definitely the closest equivalent that the Metal scene has to Diamanda Galas. Her voice is the star of the show here and throughout the entire album her voice rises and falls and adapts it's timbre to match both the changes in the music and the superbly written and very uncliched lyrics that she writes, and yes I can understand your bewilderment at that last statement; aren't Metal lyrics always supposed to make you cringe with embarrassment? Yes, usually, but remember that this is one of those bands who have thrown the generic rulebook out of the window and who exist to challenge your preconceptions. Anyway, back to her voice; As previously mentioned she matches whatever mood the song requires, from warm honey to the sharpest vinegar and all points in between. that last part is important because in sharp contrast to most other singers who can mix singing like an angel with screaming like a demon, Agnete does NOT only have 2 gears, rather she has a different gear for almost every line, and often every word of every line that she sings. This is one of the things that makes Madder Mortem's journey through such a diverse range of different styles and moods so seamless, not to mention just how inventive and inspired those lines that she sings often are. I really can't think of another singer in the Metal scene who would be able to even contemplate replicating her performance here, not one of any of the singers who I know about would be able to do it.

Agnete's performance is so impressive that it is easy to overlook the rest of the band, but that would be to ignore a large part of what makes this band so special, indeed Madder Mortem are a perfect example of a band and a singer who are perfectly suited to each other. We have already mentioned how Agnete has a different gear for every line to match exactly the emotion that the lyric conveys, well so to a certain extent does the band. So what we have here is band and singer combining to create a single, cohesive but constantly evolving emotional soundscape that rises and falls and rises again, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, going from one pole to the opposite and back again without ever losing the feeling of one band on one journey, with every moment ebbing and flowing naturally into the next.

Agnete also gets a lot of help from the band's uncanny ability to make mellower sections that do not feel particularly light. This isn't very common, most Metal bands tend to rely more on sheer firepower when going for a heavier feel to the music, Madder Mortem by contrast seem to be able to twist any arrangement to make it sound sinister or melancholy or whatever other dark adjective that they may wish for while still holding the main guns in check, for later. It is remarkable that a significant proportion of the music on this album is not Metal and that even the parts that are hardly go into extreme territory; the guitars do have quite a meaty tone on them when they want that but you won't find any blastbeats here and they never get faster than mid-tempo, yet despite this they seem to have no problem creating an uncomfortable listening experience where appropriate.

The band are usually described as Progressive Metal, and that is probably the best label for them given just how much more unsuitable every other genre-tag is. The problem is that Madder Mortem's musicianship is often understated as the band is totally focussed on playing for the song without any superfluous elements at all and the focus always remains on Agnete's vocal line throughout, whereas the Progressive Metal tag more often means the opposite and usually means Dream Theater and 3 hour long solos to most people's minds. It is not until you have given it a few listens that you notice just how high the standard of musicianship is or how complex some of the arrangements can be. The only solos here are a few isolated and low-key jazzy interludes that are there more for atmosphere than as a display of how much time has been spent practicing sweep picking, and so would hardly pass as solos at all in most prog circles.

To hear how this all works together we will take just one example. Listen to the song "Where Dream And Day Collide": For the first half of the song it is the longest uninterrupted moment of mellowness on the album, but listen closer to the attention to detail: take the verse about the girl, it starts with a dramatic (but not disjointed) shift to a much busier tempo than in the previous verse but which still retains all of the same elements of the much mellower previous verse, then with the line "In that clean, crispy chill..." yet another dramatic (but not disjointed) shift takes place with a further increase in activity from the band accompanied by Agnete singing louder with much more of an edge to her voice, still only slightly louder and edgier by the standards of how much louder and edgier she is capable of going, yet enough so that now you, dear listener, will also feel that chill as well. 17 seconds later it is all over and band and singer are back to the much mellower mood of the first part of the song, the band pulling back to give Agnete room to lament that we can all feel that chill, and only then does the heavy part of the song start. It is when you listen to it again that you notice that all through that first part that band and vocalist were ever so subtly escalating hostilities to prepare you for that change, Agnete starting neutral and getting progressively sharper until she almost sang that last line "She thought she could hide her pain" with almost as much of an edge as the part to come. Also notice that during the back to mellowness final part that she doesn't sing it the same way as she sings the similar last part of the previous verse. This is a masterclass in how to arrange your music for maximum effect but for some reason not many bands do things this way, perhaps it is just too easy to copy and paste a dozen identical bars for every verse.

I am not going to go through the individual songs on the album here, that last paragraph was about only one verse and there are lots of verses on here, and all of them different. There are 12 songs on the album, and every one of them is different to every other one too, yet forming a cohesive whole with an instantly recognisable Madder Mortem signature sound. What they all seem to share is a tendency to take some unexpected left turns throughout the song that take it in new and unpredictable directions. I personally really like this, although people who are more used to verse-chorus-verse-chorus blandness may complain. It is also surprising that they seem to be able to fit everything that they do fit into one song and still keep all of their songs (except the final track) at around average lengths, the average lengths of most songs only being around 5 minutes.

If you are here looking for bands who sound like Nightwish or Lacuna Coil then it should be obvious to you by now that that is not what you are going to get here, Madder Mortem sound like Madder Mortem and no-one else, and sound far better for it. You still owe it to yourself to experience this album though just to hear how different Metal can be. If you are looking for a Metal band who are a cliche-free zone, who have their own sound, who are challenging without sacrificing being listenable then congratulations, you have hit the jackpot, buy this album immediately because it is what you have been waiting for.

10 / 10