Rating: 5.5

Country: Finland

Genre: Epic Doom Metal

Record Label: Solitude Productions

Release Date: 2008

Track list:
1. End of Ages
2. Cosmic Key
3. Expression
4. Distant Dreams
5. Away From the World

Total playing time 01:06:06

Band Website: Astral Sleep

Astral Sleep - Unawakening


Markus Heinonen - Vocals, Guitar
Rolle Heinonen - Guitar
Jaakko Oksanen - Bass
Tommi Häyrynen - Drums

Sixty-six minutes and six seconds of epic doom metal is what Finland's Astral Sleep gives the listener on their debut full length Unawakening. The album length is important because there are only five songs: for the mathematically challenged, that's an average length of more than thirteen minutes a song. That's a lot of doom. Just because a band can write long songs, doesn't mean they should. 

Now there's nothing wrong with an album length of more than sixty minutes and song that stretch past the fifteen minute mark (some of my favorite doom albums push past both those marks: Dopethrone, Jerusalem/Dopesmoker, Times of Grace, Snailking), but what those albums have that Unawakening does is not is good and interesting songwriting.  If it weren't for minor stylistic differences, these five songs would be interchangeable. Each song is a tasteful, if somewhat bland, mélange of epic doom, doom death and traditional heavy metal: a dollop of Maiden, a cup of Paradise Lost, a spoonful of Doomsword and you have each song on this album. Astral Sleep does a good job of blending these styles together: there are no abrupt changes or choppy transitions to disrupt the flow. Unfortunately flow is relative on Unawakening because while this certainly isn't as slow as funeral doom (even if it occasionally drops into an Esoteric crawl), it also rarely reaches the mid-tempo thunder of YOB or Candlemass. What it does do is trudge along amiably and inoffensively for most of its sixty-six minute length.

Scattered throughout those sixty-six minutes are enough hints of greatness to make this album more than a little frustrating. The clean guitar break and melodic lead work about 5:30 into "Cosmic Key" is beautiful melancholia akin to what My Dying Bride perfected years ago. The harmonica that opens and is interlaced throughout "Expression" somehow evokes  the ghost of Neil Young (yes, that Neil Young!) without being cheesy or seeming out of place. Astral Sleep also manages, numerous times, to remind me of Pink Floyd with their extended instrumental sections: one of the most pleasant aspects of Unawakening is that it is largely instrumental. But despite all that, the album seems far, far, far longer than its actual running time.

This album suffers from the same thing that afflicts so many other doom albums of this sort: it's kinda boring and nondescript. It occupies the dreaded middle ground of doom metal: it's sorta heavy, sorta slow, fairly melancholic, fairly epic, slightly melodic, slightly deathly, decently played and decently produced, all of which add up to a heaping pile of mediocrity. It's certainly not bad, but neither is it good enough to require repeated listening. Cut down to forty or forty-five minutes, Unawakening would be a solid chunk of mildly inspired epic doom, but at sixty-six minutes it's a sprawling would-be masterpiece that's to unwieldy for its own good.

July 19, 2009