Melodic death metal bands with progressive aspirations tend to lean on song length to make their music stand out, not understanding that simply drawing out a track will only dilute its quality. The one exception I have found to this is Iotunn‘s Access All Worlds, a progressive melodeath album that I couldn’t put down in 2021. Filled with power metal laced guitar leads by brothers Jesper and Jens Nicolai Gräs, this concept album about a spaceship’s travels, propelled by Bjørn Wind Andersen‘s active drumming, through long form tracks in 70’s progressive rock space. The lengthy tracks are deceptively simple, immediate, yet build and twist with intent. Tying it all together is a great performance on vocals by Jón Aldará, who belts, growls, and shrieks his way through the hour-long affair. Aldará‘s vocals are in part the anchor that makes Access All Worlds remarkable to me, as the music leaves a lot of room for him to insert melodrama and meaning to the often grand sounding riffs. The album took my top spot in ’21, and while I might have chosen differently in hindsight, there’s no doubt that it’s a top tier melodeath album. However, my excitement for a follow up was tempered on hearing the preview track “Mistland”, a seeming departure from the structure of the songs on Access All Worlds…
…in that it did not seem to have a structure at all.
I might have found that clever for a track with this name, but the directionless “Mistland” is a trend, not a one-off. The effect is similar to bands like Fires in the Distance where the structure of the music is entirely linear and more resembling a kind of mood. It’s not unlike what atmospheric black metal bands do, albeit dressed up in a melodic death metal suit. The middle trio of songs (“I Feel the Night”, “The Coming End”, “Iridescent Way”) are particularly bad about this. Kinship otherwise puts a big focus on Aldará‘s semi-operatic vocals. Songs like opener “Kinship Elegiac” put much effort into building towards a brittle crescendo, a moment that would have real power would it happen in a track half the length of the song’s 13-minute playtime. But other songs seem designed around giving Aldará room for the big emotional moments, not a bad idea in itself. Yet I find these moments less impactful than their counterparts on Access All Worlds where the music did a much better job building them up. The flat and loud production of that album did the drums no favor, and this problem looms larger over Kinship as their impact is even less. This issue affects Aldará‘s growls as well as they are buried and robbed of their impact. On first spin I even missed that his growls are on a lot of the songs. Whether this is by design, I do not know, but it very well could be with how ballad-leaning the material comes across. On a positive note, the Gräs brothers’ guitar leads are again lighting up the songs with bright melodies that complement Aldará well, and there is an increasing folk influence à la early In Flames over the debut that is intriguing.
Kinship is pretty, I can’t deny that. It takes huge emotional swings but I can’t connect with them in the end. While struggling to understand why, I realized that the way the album handles contrast and structure is a big problem. That much is clear when the thin as air “Iridescent Way” (an uneventful ballad) gives way to “Earth to Sky”, a song that goes from a well built clean-harsh-vocal dynamic to an extended lead section and back again. Suddenly the structure of Access All Worlds is back and I’m reminded that I am listening to a melodic death metal band. In 2021 I marveled at the fact that Iotunn seemed to know how to navigate longer songs yet still managed to make the immediate moments memorable. Kinship often stumbles in that regard. It might have worked out had it featured snappy songs that got in quick, stopped for a moment to take in the beauty, before reaching climaxes in connection to each other. As it is, much of its moments feel suspended and disconnected from each other, leaving me with a sibling to the debut that I wish I could love more but can’t find common ground with.
