How could you remain objective, let alone dispassionate, when you are given the opportunity to write an anniversary review of one of those seminal albums that once pulled you out of a mile-deep hollow? Yeah, you guessed it – you simply cannot. So, I guess I’m going to have to violate the journalistic etiquette here and put a very personal spin on this review, sorry, not sorry. Here comes the disclaimer: KATATONIA‘s tenth studio album “Fall of Hearts” came out on May 20th, 2016, via Peaceville Records, and its release coincided with the absolute darkest hour of my life. Without going into the grim details, let’s just say that I could genuinely relate to one of those memes doing the rounds on social media at the time; remember the one that went something like this, “Why do you love music so much? Well, simply because it’s the only thing that stays when everything else goes to shit” – or something to that effect. “Fall of Hearts,” with its dark and emotive atmosphere, proved to be one of those albums that kept my head above the water, so there’s no way I can say anything objective about it, to be honest. Plus, later in the fall, on November 5th, 2016, the band played a show at The Circus in Helsinki, with the best bangers from this album in the setlist, too! Needless to say, that particular performance remains THE one of which I have the absolute fondest memories among all the shows I’ve seen from KATATONIA over the years for the obvious reasons. So, here goes… an anniversary review that’s possibly the most biased I’ve ever written!
You know, it’s one thing to have that innate affinity to Slavic melancholy that we Finns do absorb through mother’s milk. It’s another ball game entirely to suddenly realize that the music you listen to is almost like an articulation of all the dreary drama going on in your own life. KATATONIA‘s lyrics sure had resonated with a haunting, almost personal aura before, but the exquisite bleakness of this endeavor hit very differently 10 years ago. The band had enjoyed a stable lineup for quite a long time, then, all of a sudden, there were a lot of personnel changes. This album introduced a new drummer, Daniel Moilanen, and a new guitarist, Roger Öjersson of TIAMAT, on a couple of solos. Maybe that’s why “Fall of Hearts” immediately resonated with a slightly different aura than, say, “Dead End Kings” (2012) – more progressive and poignantly more intimate. By this point, these Swedes had already built quite a legacy, writing one heart-churning ode after another, dedicated to the dark nights of the soul, and yet, for me, this album hit deeper and harder than anything they had released before, because, for once, I was going through one of those myself. That said, I’ve noticed that this album is quite unequivocally cherished as one of the band’s best in a decade, so I guess all sorts of personal drama must have been a sign of the times or something…
The game is set afoot with nothing short of a proggy banger. “Takeover” is one of the band’s most epic songs in terms of song length, and the progressive flourishes do not stop there. While the themes of despair and dark melancholy have been one of the band’s signature traits since day one, these new songs really benefit from the progressive leanings – and I mean progressive in the vein of bands such as PINK FLOYD, RIVERSIDE, and PORCUPINE TREE. This type of atmospheric approach suits the music much better than differential math disguised as riffages. The ebb and flow between the serene, atmospheric, and darkly shaded melancholy and those delicious, full-throttle prog riffs is perfectly balanced on this selection, with the most striking examples being the opener and the penultimate track, “Passer,” the latter of which also hit a nerve, lyrically. Halfway through the album, “Residual” is also one of the highlights in this respect.
What makes the album sound so poignantly intimate probably has something to do with three particular tracks. First, the video single, “Serein,” gears up on gloomy melodicism in such a fashion that it simply “churns the blood,” to quote a line from the song’s lyrics. Next up, the title track churns the blood a little further. It was the lead single – and one of the reasons I had to pre-order the album back in the day. In retrospect, you can kind of sense that “Dead End Kings” was already hinting at this new direction, but the emotional weight of this new album still got me by surprise at the time, and I reckon the shit-show in my personal life was only partly to blame. I would like to make the bold claim that “Fall of Hearts” was KATATONIA‘s most mature album thus far. Anything less perfect would not have spoken to me with such force at the time, not in that emotional state that I was in. The third case in point is the haunting and mostly acoustic “Decima.” There is something quite similar to SWALLOW THE SUN‘s acoustic banger “The First Cut Is the Deepest” from their 2012 endeavor “Emerald Forest and the Blackbird” – both of these songs do cut pretty deep.
Okay, maybe I’d better elaborate on that personal drama I had some 10 years ago. If I merely drop some vague hints, you’re probably tempted to think that “Fall of Hearts” was a divorce album for me, because – let’s face it – when someone says a song or an album pulled them out from a very dark place, it’s always about some love-related bullshit, isn’t it? Well, in May 2016, when this album came out, it wasn’t about anything like that at all; I had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor and, at that point, it was yet unclear whether it was possible to have it removed or not. So, I was neck-deep in dark waters, and the lyrics on this album perfectly encapsulated my feelings of darkness, anger, and despair. As luck would have it, the alien implant of mine was surgically removed in the summer – I guess I wouldn’t be writing these reviews otherwise. A few months later, listening to “Passer,” I couldn’t help but feel it resonating with a whole new tangent as the lyrics go, “Contemplating summer and what could have been, who knows?” So, now you see why there is not a chance in this world I could be objective about this particular album – ever. It is the most important installment in KATATONIA‘s discography for so many reasons. That said, a lesser album probably could not have made such an impact in the first place. Now, 10 years later, “Fall of Hearts” still sounds every bit as poignant as it did back in the day: it is my personal comeback album, the one that helped me lift my middle finger when my life was being an extortionate motherfucker.
Written by Jani Lehtinen
Tracklist
- Takeover
- Serein
- Old Hearts Fall
- Decima
- Sanction
- Residual
- Serac
- Last Song Before the Fade
- Shifts
- The Night Subscriber
- Pale Flag
- Passer
- Vakaren
Lineup
Jonas Renkse – lead vocals, guitars, keyboards, art direction
Anders Nyström – guitars, keyboards, backing vocals, art direction
Rogers Öjersson – guitar solo on tracks 1, 7, and 12
Niklas Sandin – bass
Daniel Moilanen – drums
Label
Peaceville
