Style: Progressive metal, experimental
Primary Emotions/Themes: Existential explorations
Thoughts: Green Carnation... what a band. What a completely enigmatic yet so entirely fascinating band. There are so few bands that manage to renew their sound successfully every album, fewer still that manage to evolve in such a natural fashion as Green Carnation have over their career. Every legacy starts somewhere though, and even though this is Green Carnation's debut album it is not really the start of their legacy... we have to go further back for that.
Green Carnation at their birth was almost a direct continuation of anther Norwegian band: In the Woods... If we want to talk about experimental heavy music it is exceptionally difficult not to mention In the Woods... In fact if they were not to come up in conversation, I would question the discussion all together.
Journey to the End of Night feels much like the fourth In the Woods... album. The riffs, the vocals, the strange progressions, the haunting female vocal leads, the long periods of silence and minimalist ambience, the incredibly long songs... everything oozes In the Woods... and it can be attributed directly to the involvement of the Botteri brothers.
To say that this is a bad thing would be outright false. The music found on Journey to the End of Night is arguably the best that the band ever put out. That's a lofty statement, seeing as the follow up to this album is often considered one of the better progressive metal albums to come out around the turn of the millennium.
So what makes this one so special? That's hard to quantify. Maybe its the eerie lead guitars that hover over the complex riffs. Maybe its the music's ability to sound off yet be incredibly catchy and infections at the same time. Maybe it's the masterful way that the album makes everything sound like it doesn't quite fit together for most of the album, but then at the key moments it all snaps into place beautifully. Maybe it's none of these things, maybe it's all of them.
What I do know is that over the course of four 10+ minute songs and a short intro Green Carnation has managed to create an mystifying album in both sound and construction. The songs never follow a logical pattern or progress I expect them to. The intriguing thing about this approach is that even though the album never goes the way I expect it to, it never sounds off or unappealing. In fact this unpredictable nature is what keeps me coming back... even well after twenty years have passed. That is a hell of a legacy.
Written December 21 2023
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