Style: Progressive metal, gothic metal, doom metal
FFO: Katatonia, Pain of Salvation, Anathema, In the Woods…
Country: Norway
Release date: November 2001
Iconic albums can be great for many reasons. They may take us on fantastical journeys, dazzle with virtuosic musicianship, or give voice to feelings we thought nobody else had ever felt. And as metal fans, like most humans, we tend to get excited about things we love, which is why words like “seminal”, “gem”, “masterpiece”, and “underrated” get thrown around like they’re a dime a dozen in the musical discourse. So naturally, I’m going to use all those words in today’s post about Green Carnation.
As an ardent live music fan, I keep a spreadsheet tracking over 300 live metal performances I’ve attended with an obsessive degree of detail. For others, scrolling through this sheet might be a source of some concern regarding my mental state (and the health of my eardrums). But for me, it’s a window into countless reminiscences of fond live music memories. Amongst these, one of the greatest to date took place at ProgPower USA in 2016 where I witnessed Green Carnation performing the entirety of their 2001 album, the sixty-minute one-track wonder Light of Day, Day of Darkness. Though the show took place almost ten years ago1, the solemn appreciation that I cemented for LoDDoD has remained to this day.
Veterans of the Norwegian progressive metal scene, Green Carnation have drifted across various subgenres since their formation in Kristiansand in 1990: death metal, death-doom, acoustic, hard rock. Light of Day, Day of Darkness sees the band charting a course that touches on elements of progressive, gothic, and doom metal. From the opening bars, the album is brooding and melancholy; otherworldly synths, whispers, and guitars are overlaid with the sound of a baby’s cries. Though there are miles to go and many themes to explore over the next hour, there are no real shifts in style or full stops in the momentum; the direction is set, and the first-rate lineup of Green Carnation members and guests will be our guides.
While he does not hold compositional or lyrical credits for LoDDoD, Kjetil Nordhus’s lead vocal performance nonetheless resonates with dimensions of anger, tenderness, grief, and wonder across LoDDod’s sixty minutes. And he strikes a rare balance, weaving into the instrumental tapestry seamlessly with a poignance that doesn’t demand to be the centre of attention. Indeed, the ensemble of performances from Green Carnation tends toward understatement: there are chugging, down-tempo guitar riffs aplenty, mid-range vocal lines, subtle keyboard touches. This makes the rare extravagant moments like the sprawling, mournful guitar solo at 42:10 feel all the more earned and laden with gut-wrenching emotion. As well, Anders Kobro’s drumming plays a role not necessarily typical of bands in the gothic death/doom sphere. It’s catalytic, insistent; it drives the other instruments forward when they long to linger pensively on a certain theme.
Some of the power in Light of Day, Day of Darkness as an epic lies in the fact that it is not mounted on the shoulders of any grand, fanciful concepts. We aren’t jettisoning humanity off a dying planet into space, or trying to avoid our own death after experiencing mysterious premonitions (with much love to Seventh Wonder, Haken, et al.). Rather, the album is grounded in a realm both soberingly realistic and tragic: it explores founding Green Carnation member and guitarist Tchort’s feelings about the death of his young daughter and the birth of his son. The lyrical path trodden across the album’s sixty minutes passes through peaks and valleys—the wonder and joy of one child’s arrival, soured by the guilt and sadness of remembering the other.
A notable detour from LoDDoD’s main route happens around 33:10, where we seem to fall into the dream conceived by the narrator. Smokey saxophone undulates, parallel to but seemingly a world apart from Synne Larsen’s (ex-In the Woods…) ethereal, mostly wordless vocal performance. In the course of my research (ie., reading Reddit threads) for this post, I was shocked to see so many comments besmirching this section of the song, calling it filler or out of place. For my money, the passage is artfully executed and the inescapable melancholy on display here seems to bubble up to the surface from the same fathomless depths explored throughout the course of Light of Day, Day of Darkness. As we prepare to surface from this polarizing dreamlike detour, a tentative conversation between guitar and saxophone pulls us back to the waking world. Neither one wanting to shake us awake, the two trade gingerly back and forth for a few measures before another chugging riff finally rends the stillness. And this is the elegance of the album and Tchort’s vision: with as many as 600 samples and sixty tracks in the mix, LoDDoD could easily be too much. But the elements are intertwined with such scrupulous attention that whether it’s a guitar solo or a sitar interlude (51:30), each thought flows smoothly into the next.
Nearly twenty-four years after its release, Light of Day, Day of Darkness is a treasure trove of masterfully crafted and emotionally resonant progressive metal. Insouciant attributions of the accolades “gem”, “masterpiece”, and “seminal” aside, Green Carnation are unshakeable from their position on the Mount Rushmore of underrated Norwegian prog bands. (See also: Conception, Pagan’s Mind, and Circus Maximus.) Equally as exciting to me as the opportunity to revisit this wonderful album is the fact that the band is still making music: with rumblings of a new album on the horizon, and a return to ProgPower USA this year, I can only hope that there are many more captivating musical journeys for new and old fans alike to venture on with Green Carnation.
Recommended tracks: Perhaps a controversial pick, but I’ll go with “Light of Day, Day of Darkness”
You may also like: Throes of Dawn, October Falls, Subterranean Masquerade, Communic
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Prophecy Productions – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Green Carnation was:
– Terje “Tchort” Vik Schei: acoustic guitar, electric guitar
– Bjørn Harstad: lead guitar, slide guitar, ebow
– Stein Roger Sordal: bass
– Anders Kobro: drums
– Kjetil Nordhus: vocals
- Am I Getting Old? ↩︎
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