MONDO METAL STL: Seedna's "Forlorn"

Format: CD, Digipak CD

Label: Transcending Obscurity

Release Date: July 15, 2016

"..I wish life was like the hourglass; let’s turn it over and start again."

Seedna, an atmospheric black metal band from Sweden, has been causing a good deal of buzz for themselves lately, having just been signed to the Transcending Obscurity label (which is also a PR company and webzine, based in Mumbai, India). With “Forlorn,” their full-length label debut, Seedna absolutely establishes themselves as a creative and heavy collective.

In this album, the lyrical perspectives, when easily discernible, are introspective and very artful, carrying a good deal of emotional maturity to them. When vocalist and instrumentalist Olle states, very slowly, deeply and clearly, a set of lyrics at the onset of the album, those lyrics seem to indicate an acceptance that his life, while at times feeling simultaneously very swift and extremely slow, in the long run, it is quite like the lives of those who choose to hear him.

With that there seems a glint of hope in this, the beatific maw of the band’s created chokedamp of existence; Seedna’s “Hourglass” is the album’s second-shortest song and certainly its most heartrending and is prescient of the tracks to come.

From the album’s introduction, the music does meander another twenty-two minutes within the space of a single track yet does so with aim and builds focus, if not tension. I think the musicians here exhibit more their love and skill with shoegaze and post-metal than their proclivities for black metal, or, even their given description of atmospheric black metal; however, the influences shine through their quieter interludes without allowing the music to lose itself altogether in its own sense of purpose.

When Seedna feels it’s time to establish a more metallic-sounding motif, they do so fairly swiftly. The build-up for the somewhat harder-sounding track “Frozen” is rather insubstantive, but the resulting sudden plunge is excusable. Here, they do compel stronger feelings with their melody, but they lead you to murkier depths without arrogance. It’s slightly difficult to discern the difference between this track and its immediately subsequent work but, as an experience in this album, I feel that is fitting.

Only in “Abyssus” does Seedna approach a blacker sound, here, and the song’s paces are never furious, nor its vocals overwrought. It’s certainly not a crushing heaviness, but very bearable, straightforward and feels like an honest and proper extension of the slow, melodic themes previously established. It’s a slightly shorter trip than the first wandering on “Forlorn,” but it, unlike the journey which precedes it by nearly forty minutes, is far more a work of clamor than of wonder. In this song, they finally give vent to what could be a great deal of pressure in themselves to keep things as stoic-sounding as they have throughout the whole album.

This group, first a duo of dissatisfied Swedish punk rockers and metalheads turned experimentalists, now a quintet of musicians united on common ground to create “dark and heavy soundscapes,” have certainly a great deal of potential within themselves to produce engaging ambiance. The idea that they do not seem at all fixed on limits in their creative journey is surely an inspiring one, leaving me with a good deal of hope that Seedna will make many great albums in the years to come.