There is a divine beauty in darkness. In the shrouded bleakness, if you look hard enough, you will always find hope, redemption, and immaculate splendour. For respectively thirty-four and twenty-five years, Saturnus and Swallow The Sun have been mining the melancholic gloom for the glimmers of positivity. They both operate in a corner of the doom metal universe that is melodic and tinged with sadness as opposed to sadism. It is doom metal in the fact that it is slow and pendulous in its delivery, but it has an emotive and poignant core, focusing on affairs of the heart instead of the more fanciful and fantastic.
Read MoreI look back at my posts from the Pandemic and I really was Mr. Pessimistic about the future of live shows. I worried that they would be a residual disinterest and anxiety about attending concerts once they resumed. Actually, the opposite has been true. Even though we are in the middle of the cost-of-living crisis and the vast majority of us are struggling financially, I have never seen the live music scene this healthy. It's almost as if we have exited lockdown with a different ideology and temperament.
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