Where Twilight Dwells

Midnattsol’s debut album is really lacking in almost every category of making music. One would think that a folk metal act from Norway that features the little sister of Liv Kristine from Theatre of Tragedy stands a great chance of becoming a folk metal masterpiece. Sadly, this is not the case for poor Midnattsol. As I stated before, the band members fail in everything they attempt to do.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a complete failure. There are two solid, and I only mean solid, songs on this album. “Lament” and “Haunted” give the release its only 4 points. Two points for each. These songs are somewhat good due to fair songwriting, and the fact that they are actual metal songs. However, both of these songs are not good songs due to the performance of Carmen Espenaes. Her vocals are dreadfully annoying and flat out horrible sounding. She has a terrible sounding accent, absolutely no power, and virtually no singing ability whatsoever. She clearly was hired by the band just because she is the sister of Liv.

Besides those two songs and the album’s opener (which is not as great as they wanted it to be) metal music is very lacking. The remaining eight songs are nearly all acoustic with the ghastly singer featured. I love acoustic folk, like Ulver’s Kveldssanger, but when your vocalist sounds like granny singing in the shower, there is no hope for crafting acoustic magic like the afore mentioned Ulver. At least when Garm did it, he sang beautifully and dominated the album with his very powerful voice. Here, we have an acoustic mess of poorly written melodies and a weak singer atop of it.

When the band actually plays metal, they can write fairly effective songs only to be ruined by Carmen’s painfully repugnant vocals. Guitars are solid, with good riffing here and there, but still very inconsistent.

The drum work is nothing special, just your typical drummer for a project with female vocals. No speed changes, no time signature differences, and certainly no blastbeats can be found here. Just 4/4 (common time) keeping the beat throughout the album.

This album is very atrocious and does not grow on you over time. Avoid this album if you like good vocals and real metal. Do not purchase the album just because it is Liv’s little sister, because you do not want to sit through this garbage even once. This is not even worth downloading.

Midnattsol's album "Where Twilight Dwells" is, as albums go, a rather impressive debut. Of course, it's not as if this band simply came together and released this album - most of the instrumentalists have been in the same bands as each other before, and the only new face is vocalist Carmen Elise Espanaes, who just happens to be Liv Kristine's sister, so even she has some kind of pedigree.

The band is listed here as "folk metal" in part, and far be it from me to criticise that listing. Just don't expect too much of a folk influence right from the start, as it's really on the ballads that this style is played up. On the harder numbers, Midnattsol sounds more like a standard-issue gothic metal act. Such folk influence as there is, incidentally, sounds very Celtic in parts. There are multi-tracked vocals, Carmen almost seems to have adopted an Irish accent on songs like "Desolation" (my pick of the ballads, incidentally, partly because it has a stronger backing), soft acoustic guitars and so forth. There's even a mouth harp every so often, which is ever so slightly intrusive.

I mentioned "harder numbers" a moment ago, and this is definitely the case. The album opens with "Another Return", which features one of the trademarks of the band's sound - a surprisingly crisp guitar sound. I really can't explain it better than that, but it's not a sound quality which I've heard in too many other places. The guitar is significantly more prominent in the mix than I expected. This is the case on each one of the harder tracks.

Being Norwegian, though, they couldn't escape without a song or two in their native language. "Pa Leting" is one such track, and it features a very solid melding of the ballad and hard styles they're prepared to play. I can't claim to understand the lyrics, but as is often the case over this album the lyrics are closer to "the sound made by Carmen's voice as an instrument" than they are to "the lyrics of distinct songs". Readers familiar with the work of Jon Anderson of Yes - who famously sings very impressionistic lyrics designed more to sound in a certain way rather than express concrete ideas - will probably have some idea of what I mean here.

There's definitely some real promise in Midnattsol, and more than enough to make me keep an eye out for more albums by them. The reason that I haven't given this a higher rating is that it feels a bit "safe" as an album. Admittedly, this is the first outing for the band as a cohesive unit, but there's a sense that they're working well within themselves and just aren't quite prepared to adventure beyond the templates they've laid down. Admittedly, gothic metal is a relatively stylised genre, but there's more than a little folk influence here and that (as we all know) is one of the metal styles which never fails to throw up weird and wonderful results. Perhaps, therefore, a stronger folk sense is what's required on album number two. To be fair, though, I'd buy another album from this lot even if it didn't move too much beyond what they have here.

Midnattsol's full-length debut shows that while the members have been in the same bands in the past, that familiarity does little to harm their efforts. Equal parts haunting acoustic melody and surprisingly heavy power metal, Where Twilight Dwells shows the band is capable of pulling off the coveted combination with ease where so many other bands of similar style founder.

Guitarists Christian Hector and Daniel Droste turn in tasteful performances, alternating between the punishing riffs of "Lament" and folksy acoustic passages in several songs, with a good amount of competent solos intended to complement rather than overpower Carmen Elise Espenaes's contralto singing. Impressively consistent songwriting shows the rest of the band is certainly capable of handling their instruments as well, as the rhythm section pounds away in "Another Return" and sets a slower pace for the numerous ballads on the album, notably "Unpayable Silence" and the native-tongued "Pa Leting."

Unfortunately, that consistency is the album's only flaw of any great significance. Midnattsol either must have taken great pains to rig the arrangements to give the listener a frustratingly revealing look at what the band does best, or they simply didn't realize that the resulting power metal-power ballad-power metal structure makes the entire effort sound staged. Considering that this is hardly the first band the members have found themselves in together, the latter seems highly unlikely. Couple the structure with the inordinate number of saccharine ballads and an irritating mouth harp, and repeated listens become painful.

Rather, Where Twilight Dwells is a calculated recording, made so consistent with the intent to prove that the band is neither another female-fronted folk band nor another Nightwish knockoff, but is an outfit with something original to say. Sadly, the focus on dispelling any of the listener's prejudices leaves little room for including anything other than pummeling aggression jarringly divided by soulful sadness for over the album's hour-plus length.

Impressive enough and listenable but maddening in the truest sense of the word, Midnattsol charts waters that should be familiar enough to anyone who's heard the members' material in past bands. Whether or not they'll push themselves a bit farther next time after proving themselves competent now remains to be seen.