Insomnium’s “The Hour Grows Late”

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “The Hour Grows Late” from Insomnium.

I typically struggle with melodic death metal. It feels often to attempt to split the difference between too many elements and as a result drop the aspects most moving to me about each. Insomnium is one of the bands, however, that makes me incapable of writing the genre off. It helps that there is a strong vein of folk music and doom metal within their sound, giving a richness of pathos that some others of the style lack. They are consistently mournful, evoking the plains of Finland and the complex history of the country with sweeping epics of loss. It helps as well that, truthfully, the death metal elements are exceptionally minor, often being remaindered just to the vocals and even then as but one texture of many.

“The Hour Grows Late” is an example of them at their best. It’s a progressive song, evolving through moods and layers, filled with recapitulations of themes and new arrangements of earlier ideas. But, like the great epics of Led Zeppelin, they unfurl without pretense, feeling as natural in each shift as a chord change in another song would be.

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Insomnium are past the point of needing to reinvent their sound, with each album in the wake of their masterpiece Winter’s Gate being another excursion to map the edges of what their current approach is capable of. Here, the rich folk metal infused with melodic, extreme, and progressive elements calls to mind their fellow coutnrymen in Moonsorrow. Fall is a time of melancholy and introspection and Insomnium deliver on this necessity. It’s our Heavy Song of the Week.

Honorable Mentions

King Buffalo – “Vagabond”

It has long been said that, left alone for long enough, proggy heavy rock bands will reinvent Rush from first principles. So it is here, with King Buffalo delivering a riff worthy of Counterparts, the criminally underrated ’90s Rush record. The key difference is that instead of using choruses for contrasting energy, King Buffalo leans into the desert rock mentality of repetition over everything, letting a psychedelic heft overtake the song as they layer more and more on top of an already killer groove. It’s a perfect example of how odd time signatures grooving or not is a skill issue, with this gnarly track riding a 5/4 groove but still feeling like you are barreling down a night highway, smoke pouring from your hood and bad acid still rattling in your head making the road hiss and writhe like a serpent.

Liminal – “Hyper Normal”

The title track from Liminal’s third album, out today, is a perfect encapsulation of what makes this young psych-prog band so exciting. The same fearlessness that drove the more bizarre wing of early psychedelia like the killer cut “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers is present here, with strange time signatures and trippy vibes melted hot against the level of groove we expect today from King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. For those of a mind to turn on, tune in, and drop out, this will do a treat, splitting the difference between hard rock toothsomeness and Gong levels of playfulness. In a perfect world, this will be their breakout album, given how sterling it is front to back.

Tantric Bile – “Nailed to the Caucasus”

This song is quite simply blisteringly insane. A ferocious cacophony of flutes, blastbeats, gurgled vocals and strains of contemporary classical music at war with free jazz, “Nailed to the Caucasus” off of the new Tantric Bile record Pyrphoros out this week is a brilliant example of the outer limits of heavy music. Tantric Bile is another project from Matt Stephens, the same wunderkind behind similar avant-garde groups like Detritivore, Neural Indent, and his most acclaimed, Effluence. The fact that heavy music contains music as far out as this and as direct as King Buffalo or Fake Names, that it possesses the warmth and melodiousness of Insomnium and the utterly unhinged wings of contemporary grindcore, is a profound joy. Napalm Death and John Zoen’s mutual admiration for each other in the ’80s, along with Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth’s mutual love, led us eventually here, a hybridizing of several blistering musical traditions that underscores the unity of intent in this sonic world.