My dalliances with the long song format began back in the day with Metallica’s Master of Puppets. Compositions scaling the extremities of the eight-minute mark proved quite a peculiarity to a young teenager nourished, up to then, on the likes of Aerosmith and Nirvana. The extended tentacles of ‘Orion’ ringed themselves around my ear drums; my auditory canal was corked by the riffarama of ‘Disposable Heroes’. The elongated double-stops of the title track smashed my head into the concrete with absolute disdain at a four-minute piece of naivety.
Then came Opeth, powering up the jigsaw of musical taste, epic musical creations clenched in teeth. Orchid and Morningrise both brought songs whose heads bobbed just above the rim of the ten-minute milestone. Then, of course, on the latter album came the brilliant opus of ‘Black Rose Immortal’, standing slouchless at twenty minutes and fourteen seconds.
Dream Theater tumbled out soon afterwards. The lengthy soundscapes of ‘A Change of Seasons’ and, more recently, ‘Octavarium’ bustling over the twenty minute benchmark, and succeeding to enthral and captivate with their excellence.
In 2001, out of the womb walked a composition to make those aforementioned tracks blush in submissive embarrassment, it went by the name of Light of Day, Day of Darkness.
Conceived, gestated and born of Norwegian metal band Green Carnation, this single-song album runs at a mammoth sixty minutes and six seconds, making it loom with grand enormity over it’s shorter cousins.
Despite that preamble into the ways of elongated metal, fanfare and superlatives, we are all perfectly aware that the length of things really matters not; the temporal format in fact coruscates with irrelevance. It’s what infests the waters of content that truly snatches at our concerns here.
Green Carnation is ostensibly a band leaning on the banisters of the progressive, yet each album has showcased something overtly different from the last. Light of Day, Day of Darkness is their second album, and probably the only one that can be labelled with the pigment of prog metal, first album Journey to the Centre of the Night being more of a doom-laden affair. While subsequent album Blessing in Disguise is more straight-forward metal, brandishing shorter arrangements and the habits of hard rock. Then there’s the further increment of traditional rock formats in 2005’s The Quiet Offspring, and the acoustic-based merits of The Acoustic Verses, released earlier this year.
But all that is surplus froth when contrasted with the magnificence of Light of Day, Day of Darkness. Oops, I’ve blundered into unveiling the reviewer’s best kept secret, the concluding verdict, the apotheosis of opinion. Well, let those strains of praise leap forth from my words, encircle the skyways, and perhaps even show-off a few dives south like a kingfisher.
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