The album/the song has been masterminded by band founder and leader Tchort, former four-string rogue for Emperor. Put simply, he has crafted an amazing piece of music, one that flows through different moods with ease, and is as epic in sound as it is in length. The music builds and cascades and folds and traverses through different sections, manoeuvring effortlessly from a riff-heavy verse to an airy symphonic interval. The album sleeve is adorned with a range of photographs - taken by Tchort himself - of Norwegian lakeside forest expanses, an assortment of beauty equalled by the music contained within, an appropriate graphic accompaniment.
Passages are returned to, cues seeded and revisited at a later moment; this really is a uniform composition. Too many long songs, or any-length songs, sound like nothing beyond a collection of disparate riffs - and sometimes this is fine. But Light of Day, Day of Darkness is one self-contained masterwork.
Complete with huge chugging, chunky guitar riffs, the album sounds massive. Definitely the ambrosia of studio miracles overhang this album, guitars layered like sediment from pre-Cambrian times, and a sublime mixing where every element seems to be at the forefront. Compared with the partial rendition on the DVD Live and Well…in Krakow, you can hear the mastery at work, the live version cursed as it is with an overloud lead guitar and diminutive rhythm section. Light of Day, Day of Darkness is a rhythm-based album, relatively simple riffs act as bricks in it’s bestial wall of sound.
One slight discrepancy is the ambient mid-section featuring the cackles of an aching female voice. While it may be suitable for the piece as a whole, it didn’t alight my aural subjectivity.
As already premeditated, the album is a breathtaking opus, from the introductory serene melodies, to the harmonious vocals, and from the strained emotions of the protracted guitar solo, to the final slabs of wonderful verse, it deserves to stand proud in showers of acclaim. And hark! Lead it to that apex, and then go forth with odes in the heart for Tchort and company, resonating to every passer-by the good melodious news of Light of Day, Day of Darkness.
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