Jonathan Hultén’s pivot from extreme metal to something more ethereal has been one of the more welcome transformations of the past few years.
On his 2020 debut album, Chants From Another Place, the former guitarist with Swedish growlers Tribulation stripped away the gnarled noise in a favour of a liminal beauty: Nick Drake resurrected and relocated to a wintry Scandinavian forest, dressed in 1920s movie-star makeup and a widow’s veil.
Where the debut was painted in shades of muted blue, green and grey, Eyes Of The Living Night feels like an explosion of colour, the hushed and haunted ambience of its predecessor blossoming into something more expansive. If his spirit guides on that first record were the bare-bones Drake, folk-era John Martyn and Bert Jansch, this time around it feels more like the influence of Kate Bush has been brought to bear.
Not necessarily sonically – though the waltz-time tempo and music-box harpsichord of Song Of Transience marks it as a close cousin of Army Dreamers, and piano-led instrumental Through The Fog, Into The Sky would slot neatly into The Ninth Wave – but certainly terms of ambition and self-contained world-building.
The Saga And The Storm ushers in the album with a gentle wash of synth and crystal-clear keyboard melody, before Hultén’s sonorous voice leads it down darker paths to a climax that sees him carving graceful arcs of guitar through the night air.
A set of songs that transcend their influences to sound like nothing else
The gently distorted Riverflame is haunted by the ghost of an electric piano and crying six string, all carried by a stirring yet understated melody. Dawn billows in on a cloud of acoustic guitar and keyboards then proceeds to rise up through the atmospheric layers to who knows where.
Each song has a different feel: The Dream Was The Cure features a wall of strummed acoustic guitars, The Ocean’s Arms floats on a sea of non-urgency, and Falling Mirages would be a pure folk homage were it not to the odd whistling keyboard noise that summons old 50s movies.
The common thread is Hultén’s voice – or voices. He uses his vocal as another instrument, treating it with electronic effects or distorting it so it sounds like he’s singing from another room, or stacking tracks so he sounds like a one-man choir. Sometimes his lyrics are so indistinct they may as well be wordless. Sometimes they are actually wordless.
The cumulative effect is startling, brilliant and frequently beautiful – a set of songs that transcend their influences to sound like nothing else. ‘Imagination knows no bounds,’ he sings on spiralling closer Starbather, a mini-epic that comes closest to vintage prog. This album proves as much.
Eyes Of The Living Night is on sale now via Kscope.
