LIGHT OF DAY, DAY OF DARKNESS

Best song : Hahahahahahahaha! Actually, the best moments are possible the first 5 minutes or so.

Overall Rating: 10

This is a sixty minute progressive metal masterpiece, which is nothing short of one of the greatest achievements known to mankind! Or, it should have been. Sadly, it's not. No, maybe a better title for this album would have been thick as a trick, because the 60 minute song length can trick you into thinking it's can't be anything but an inarguable musical master-work. There are several things that drag this beast down several notches, barring it from reaching those lofty heights of sheer aural orgasm.

The most inescapable of these is the song's sheer magnitude. It can't help but be crushed under its own behemoth stature. Where I used to defend extended song cycles by explaining how it isn't a standard 5 minute song, stretched to 15, 25, 45, whatever minutes, but it was a truly evolving, diverse, flowing musical journey, and used to explain how albums such as Thick as a Brick were an admirable excuse to tie a plethora of smaller song segments under one cohesive conceptual banner, I can't do that with Light of Day, Day of Darkness, because it literally sounds like two 5 minute songs that got stretched out to 60 minutes. I don't feel as if the band, or Tchort (whoever came up with the idea) really wanted to make this for any other reason than to have made such a long song. The song just goes into a myriad of repetition for the first half hour, repeating those same chord sequences, recycling those same doom metal riffs, returning to those same cheesy male choir chants, and completely overusing what started out as a suitably intriguing melody.

As I said before, the first few minutes or so are quite interesting, and offer a vague glimpse at what might have been, before someone let their ego butcher things ten ways from blood-soaked Sunday. It's still fairly entertaining, if a little pedestrian. The doom metal melodies are laughable, if you pay close attention, and the soft acoustic passages you find a couple times are nice little jingles, but nothing really grabs your soul like you know it should. I listened to this song the entire time, teetering between fully entertained and anxiously bored. When you look at it, the song's main theme is very well written, but for an hour of solid, uninterrupted music, it honestly goes nowhere. So I sat here the whole time, anxiously awaiting for something to pick up, for it to go somewhere, for the journey to commence, but that moment never came. The same basic melody gets monotonously repeated for the first half hour, so that neat li'l jingle-tune you hear at the beginning? That's what you'll be hearing for a long while, pal, so either get used to it and love it to death, or jump ship. Me, I still think I'll reach for the life-raft, thank you.

Then, when you think that obnoxious doom chug won't ever go away, boom, the song just drops into the voids of eastern pleasure (not that pleasure). Actually, it's just some woman doing her soul thang, terribly. I am reminded of Claire Torre's Great Gig In The Sky vocals, but these are simply atrocious in comparison. She's got a nice voice, but it lacks passion, it lakes direction, it lacks ...good melodies, and it sort of gets on my nerves, plus that sax work is predictable and amateurish, at best. Oh, and to top it all off, this movement goes on for 6 minutes and is set to this stupid synth background that silly black metal bands tend to use all the time. They call it "atmosphere", I call it "brain-dead garbage". And as soon as our eastern soul is relinquished, it goes right back to the song's original plodding melody, but a little more palatable, on account of the tasteful piano addition, but it's still mind-grinding in how god damn repetitive it is. And that's the whole story. It's just way too much music for how predictable and generic the musical theme is. Maybe if they'd chopped the album in half it would be easier to consume, but there are only three main ideas, so I'd strip it to a fifteen minute EP, myself. It's usually entertaining, but none of it grabbed me like the 60 minute running time seemed to promise.

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