Friend, here’s a truth that I hope you will carry with you, especially if you ever feel even a twinge of guilt or shame about being unfamiliar with a particular album, or about being not quite as well-versed in a particular musician as you feel you ought to be: there is – scientifically speaking – a fuckin’ LOT of music out there. It’s true! Right this very second, as you read these words? You guessed it: more music was just born, bloody and screaming and desperate for your love and attention.
Why am I telling you this when I am supposed to be telling you about the new album from Finland’s Autumnfall, The Archaic Sins? Well, Autumnfall is a relatively new band helmed by Jussi Hänninen. Hänninen was also the principal songwriter of the band Fall of the Leafe, who released six albums between 1998 and 2007 (and from whose first demo, 1996’s Storm of the Autumnfall, this new project takes its name). My confession, however, is that I have never listened to Fall of the Leafe. The name is familiar to me, most likely from seeing the latter albums released on Rage of Achilles and then Firebox Records in various online distros at the time, but, well… music: there’s a lot.
The other reason to keep carping about Fall of the Leafe here is that Hänninen’s explicit aim with Autumnfall – under which name this latest album is the project’s fourth – is to revisit compositions originally written during the early days of Fall of the Leafe. According to the album’s promotional materials, seven of its eight songs were composed as Fall of the Leafe demos from 1998-2001. It’s unclear A) which tune here is the new composition and B) why none of the others made it onto earlier Fall of the Leafe albums, but thankfully, it’s easy to let the backstory to The Archaic Sins slip away as soon as the album gets cooking and reveals its considerable strengths.
If you had to pin a single musical description on The Archaic Sins, the most sensible thing to reference would be melodic black metal. Since nobody is forcing you or me to choose just one description, I will happily inform you that Autumnfall sets a very interesting table where melodic black metal, melancholic doom/death, gothic metal, and folk metal collide. The album’s credits are a little vague, but it seems like Hänninen might handle all instrumentation, with vocals provided by Tero Ruohonen. Olli Pirkkanen was credited with playing drums on the first two Autumnfall albums, but I suspect we might be hearing programmed drums from Hänninen on this one. Ultimately, though, this album is all about wringing maximum emotion out of relatively straightforward yet carefully interlocking dual-guitar leads and bass lines, so the drums are primarily needed to put up the scaffolding upon which all the rest is terraced.
“Dark Goddess” is a prime example of how Autumnfall’s music often feels inspired by that particularly-Swedish strain of mid-90s melodic black metal (Dissection, Necrophobic, Dawn, Naglfar, Unanimated, etc.), yet even here, a far more gothic melancholy creeps into the song’s final third. Elsewhere, the album opener “Halo in Utopia” layers some synth piano against its snaky guitar harmonies, all of which ends up giving the song a more neoclassical angle that also feels somewhat similar to Obsequiae. The album’s second half kicks off with “Crystal Skies,” which spends much of its time in a slightly more restrained cadence. It’s in these moments, where the black metal intensity eases off somewhat, that Autumnfall most clearly shows the influence of Katatonia or Rapture. Album closer “The Timeless Kin,” in addition to demonstrating the sheer pleasure of Autumnfall’s clean-chiming guitar tones, imparts a bit of well-integrated folk melody in a manner somewhat reminiscent of their countrymates in Amorphis.
So, with all due apologies to Fall of the Leafe-heads, I have no idea how Autumnfall’s The Archaic Sins stacks up against the soil from which it apparently sprang. As I’ve been at irritating pains to say, though, there’s simply too much music out there for any one set of ears to hear. As a new listener to Jussi Hänninen’s songwriting, I like it! In fact, the best thing about this album to me is that it strikes a very satisfying – and somewhat unusual – balance between comfort and surprise.
What I mean is, all the pieces assembled here are familiar and comforting. As autumn, uh… falls in the northern hemisphere, I usually find myself drawn to the sounds of the constituent pieces of Autumnfall’s blend. When I seek that kind of comfort, then, I’m perhaps more forgiving of imitation-cum-inspiration than I would normally be, so I might be equally happy listening to Katatonia’s Discouraged Ones as I would be listening to some random new album that sounds 90% like Discouraged Ones. But that’s unsustainable long-term. Why I appreciate Autumnfall is that its 46 minutes are chock full of moments that make me think, “Oh, yes, that’s exactly the kind of thing I expected to hear, and that’s amazing,” but they also bring in variations on those themes in ways that are surprising even though they stay within the basic tenets of the style.
One specific example is “Lightless Depths,” which whips through excellent rhythm switch-ups to carry its folky theme and some of Ruohonen’s sharpest rasps. It’s excellent, but excellent in ways that probably feel like slipping into your favorite broken-in hoodie. Just before the 3:30 mark, though, the song pauses briefly and then drops into a coda-like section for its final minute. The song is still in the same key, but they’ve switched up to a simpler rhythmic variation of the mode for that opening theme, and the thing that really makes it pop is an unexpected interval. The coda’s four note melody goes E-Ab-Gb-B, so it’s the jump from G flat all the way down to B that stands out as just far enough outside what your ear naturally expects. It’s a small thing, all told, but it tells me that Hänninen has really worked the hell out of these songs, which makes it doubly impressive, then, how smoothly they all go down.
The unavoidable fact that the universe is full (and always fuller) of more music than any mortal can know does not mean that we should all lapse into despair at never containing it all. Instead, we should celebrate this richness because it gifts us the freedom to follow what moves us. There are few small pleasures finer than finding something previously unknown to us that feels as if it might have been made precisely for us. That’s where Autumnfall lands for me right now. It’s on you to decide whether to chart your own path with it, and that’s a gift of its own.
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