Songs from the North: I'm lost in your wilderness!

I'm compelled to blog again by Swallow the Sun's 2015 triple album Songs from the North, something a bit outside the usual heaviness range of my music tastes. Spotify suggested it to me and I gave it a hesitant try. As it turns out, Songs from the North is three beautiful albums relating to each other intricately, all replete with shades of melancholy. After a month, listening and reading the lyrics still give me sudden moments of admiration.

I don't know how to criticize music, so you shouldn't expect me to do that— I just want to talk about what makes Songs from the North so beautiful and my personal reactions.

The three movements are summarized in "The Memory of Light": "From the fires of yesterday / until the hell of tomorrow / the memory of light is all we have"—it's a nice chorus. The character goes from guilt and temptation to sin in part I, to a vivid hell in the really heavy III, and in between catches a glimpse of light in the musically lighter II.

I'm only a casual listener and haven't ever felt this strongly about a particular album, as in a unit of music. In this case I find myself appreciating the whole thing as a large, cohesive work because it really lends itself to that; I learned to like the heavier songs at the end despite that their style doesn't appeal to me right away, just because they were a part of the whole. It is clearly something beyond the individual tracks. I love how it puts me in a morbid mood and relieves that particular mood at times with a bit of dying light. The same images—wings, fire, the North—come up across songs and across the three movements, but in different ways, but eventually form a fuller picture of the character's dark world. There's a running theme of orientating oneself to the North, a place of salvation by nature's beauty beyond that of Christianity.

It's amazing how much the album goes through. It involves dark romance, contrasts Christianity and paganism or maybe the spiritual and the earthly, and invokes a Mother Nature. The more realistic "7 Hours Late" caught me off guard with its sadness, since it leaves behind the metaphors for a while and goes into the character missing the chance to exchange final words with his father. 

When I first read the lyrics, I puzzled over how the songs connect. Some tracks seem to together tell a story. Even the transition between parts II and III seems to take the character from begging to see another dawn to being in hell. Yet there are also contradictions, like whether the character pled for another day or killed himself, whether the "you" is a woman who led him to sin or the personification of the North. My immediate reaction was to want the three albums to be disconnected stories. III is bitterly depressing, and I wanted it to be separate from the gentler melancholy of the others. But the ambiguity is part of the artistry, and maybe is part of the story itself.

Note the crucifixes in place of the other directions. So many
details like this!

I find it so uplifting that even Swallow the Sun, as much as they sing of despair and death, can find such refuge in the "memory of light." Maybe I'm taking part II too literally, but I am really comforted by its idea that it really is possible to deal with the tragic through consolation from the splendor of nature. There's fire in all three movements, but no one burns in the "autumn fire" of II. The connotations of darkness in I and especially III are so dismal that it's very relieving to refer back to II, where the dark is merely associated with the constant darkness of the northern winter. It's a much milder sort of "eternal  nights" which has its charms—the whimsically portrayed sky in "Autumn Fire"—and will soon give way to the "ever-light" of summer.

Later, after making it through most of the crushing III, the hope re-emerges: the character arises from hell to battle for his freedom and, even after being removed from the world, return to the North. That weighty album thus ends on a very fitting cliffhanger: he finally gets to see the North again, and the girl from I, if she's indeed the one referred to. Also the gloom and the hope, as they have throughout Songs from the North, complement each other. He might have won.