album review : One For Sorrow (2011) - Insomnium

album : One For Sorrow

artist : Insomnium

genre : Melodic Death Metal

year : 2011

Yes, they did make you feel like you’ve lost everything in life. They did make you sense their pain even at times when you were happy, all because you decided to play their songs. They did make darkness look more dark than you’d expect it to be. Somebody had to make you go through all of this and in the melodic death genre it was Insomnium. And, they had set out to do just that which implies success kissed their feet with a whole lot of mourning.

But this Finnish band, with a stronghold in the department that matches the unpleasant description I provided, has come to a point where it seems they have robbed you of all the cheerfulness they could. Now, on their fifth full-length One For Sorrow they are taking their skills of playing the instruments to a better level without providing much variety in their sound.

One For Sorrow takes off in a very promising manner with Inertia, where in desolation is touched upon. They’ve kept the album opener simplistically strong. Once you hit track number two Through The Shadows old-Insomnium memories begin to creep in. And this record shouldn’t have sounded like that. Not always. The pattern continues and the only thing one can do now is try to find a song that is better than the other because they all are from the same old-Insomnium tree. A tree which has had stronger branches in the past.

So, going by the above logic Song of The Blackest Bird, Unsung, Regain the Fire and One For Sorrow are more melodic, more death and more metal than the rest. In fact Unsung and the title track manage to transfer you to some place Insomnium has in mind. I just can’t stop playing Decoherence, as it is something else altogether. It is a song that stands on it’s own feet. Decoherence is melodic metal, with no death in it.

Insomnium has always been spraying melancholy all over us, and even though I hate to say this about one of the bands that I love listening to every once in a while, this time over with One For Sorrow they sound a bit stagnated. No doubt all songs on the record are good but they haven’t experimented or composed anything that we did not expect them to. But I will always have a thing for this band for being one of the very few acts that have rightly understood my favorite emotion.

Rating : 3/5

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