GREEN CARNATION – A Dark Poem, Part 1: The Shores Of Melancholia (Album Review)

Few metal bands have traversed as many genres and soundscapes as Norway’s Green Carnation have. From their beginnings as a blackened doom project, to their venture into hard rock on The Quiet Offspring, to their unplugged offering of original material (and two covers) that was The Acoustic Verses, Green Carnation have found their happy place in the quite unhappy world of progressive doom, a sound they first explored over twenty years ago on the album many consider to be their masterwork, Light of Day, Day of Darkness.  On A Dark Poem, Part 1: The Shores of Melancholia, their second proper album since their unexpected reformation in 2014, Green Carnation continues refining their prog-doom identity while honoring the ground they’ve covered during their adventurous career.

Tchort’s slow, trudging, Sabbath-inspired riff gets “As Silence Took You” going before the entire band kicks in, lead guitarist Bjørn Harstad laying a morose dirge overhead. Part Viking/ part nephilim frontman Kjetil Nordhus delivers the album’s chilling opening lines: “A lion could rip the flesh right off your bones/ A mother the same –  she could do it with six simple words… ‘I am so disappointed in you.’” Yow. With a delivery as imposing as his stature, Nordhus then laments that he comes with burden, concern, and constant worry, his bandmates hoisting him aloft a sonic palanquin as if he needed their assistance.

The effect? The absolute dissolution of the listener’s sense of self-worth, the aural equivalent of weeping at one’s own funeral, only for the interlude riff to wordlessly describe your own spiraling descent into that Fabled Abyss Below. Now-former keyboardist Kenneth Silden gives us his finest Mark Kelly impersonation underneath Nordhus’s lament that “there was no limit to your compassion, I was just too blind to see.” Harstad revives that doleful mourn as Nordhus delivers the cut’s petrifying closing line: “Your watch has ended, but I feel that you are still here with me/ I never got to say goodbye as silence took you.”

That was just the first song, y’all. Epicus doomicus metallicus indeed.

“In Your Paradise” opens with shockingly direct metal riffage that pays homage to past glories like “Crushed to Dust” and “The Writing on the Wall.” While “In Your Paradise” could easily have fit on the record that boasted those two fine tracks, it boasts the refinement of a band that’s undergone some shit in the twenty-plus years since that particular record made a Green Carnation diehard out of me. That maturity manifests in such subtleties as a gentle flute at the refrain, with a somehow even gentler Nordhus crooning a melody that borrows from Sarah Brightman that “these are the lies you don’t want to stay alive,” but repeating that after the heaviest moment on the album up to this point – and where drummer Jonathan Perez pays homage to one Mike Portnoy – gives that surprisingly smooth transition even more weight. So flawlessly is it executed that the listener barely notices that Green Carnation has gone from Alive and Well in Krakow to A Night Under the Dam in literal seconds.  This miracle ain’t no sleeper.

“Me My Enemy” beckons both Soen’s “Savia” and Green Carnation’s own “Lullaby in Winter,” Stein Roger Sordal’s delicately driving bass carrying the verses without drawing much attention to himself. This cheerful ode to suicidal ideation spends its first half lulling us into a false sense of tranquility as the narrator tries to talk himself off the ledge before he finally admits that darkness has gotten the best of him. Harstad’s poignant solo and Silden’s further salute to Marillion walk us through the descent and the turmoil of a mind set on ridding itself of thought. The song’s heaviness crushes the soul without damaging your hearing and is a masterfully crestfallen depiction of despair. Don’t listen to this within arm’s reach of a weapon.

Where “Me My Enemy” rejects heaviness for the sake of heaviness, “The Slave That You Are” embraces it with vile fervor. The listener is greeted with freaking blast beats and trem picking, crowned by the unmistakable shriek of (wait for it…) Enslaved frontman Grutle Kjellson. Let’s those who recoil at black and death metal be dissuaded, rest assured that this, while it is unmistakably a progressive black metal tune, bears no resemblance to titans of that genre like Borknagar.

It is 100% Green Carnation, their melodic doomy goodness shining through the entirety of the track with the unmistakably blackened elements relegated to where they’re most appropriate: in your face.  Despite an interlude that will leave you thinking you’re listening to My Arms, Your Hearse and lyrics that evoke Nazi Germany (“The work will free you/ your work will welcome you as the slave that you are”), the non-blackened moments are a worthy reward for listeners who consider themselves enemies of extreme metal.

The title track follows that blackened beast with all the regal ruinousness we’ve come to expect from this reformed ensemble. A pleasantly direct tune, it bears the distinction of feeling like a brief radio ditty despite its nearly six-minute duration. Given that these guys made their mark with a song over ten times the length of this one, “The Shores of Melancholia” sometimes seems over as quickly as it started. But given the strength of the composition, melodies, and evocative imagery, there’s a lot of yumminess packed into a song whose length rivals that of an interlude or two Green Carnation have written. It’s clear, it’s concise, it doesn’t stray from its very clear path, and it’s as close to conventional as we are likely to hear from these guys in a while. A powerful point, made relatively quickly. Perhaps this is what passes as a radio single for these guys, Kjellson’s occasional gnarls notwithstanding.

“Too Close to the Flame” is the curtain call, and I’ll be damned if it ain’t a fine way to top off a first-rate album. Opening with one of the many straight-ahead metal riffs that adorn this stellar record, it veers into more nomadic territory immediately following the second refrain. What you thought was to be a direct metal tune (d)evolves into a propitiously tense accompaniment to such lyrics as “if you only knew the things I do to get over you” that matches the urgency of Light of Day, Day of Darkness, with the knowledge that we’re quickly approaching the end of the line.

And with that, Part 1 of what is expected to be that “trilogy of doom” founder Tchort has discussed for decades ends. Though A Dark Poem, Part 1: The Shores of Melancholia is absolutely not the Rise and Fall of Mankind that the band had teased before their 2007 breakup, it does more than live up to the stratospheric expectations a band of this caliber has set for itself. Seldom is such a whirlwind of emotional earspank so effortlessly crammed into an album that clocks in at under 43 minutes, but Green Carnation have done exactly that. Again.

Release Date: September 5th, 2025
Record Label: Season Of Mist
Genre: Progressive Metal

Musicians:

• Kjetil Nordhus / Vocals
• Jonathan Perez / Drums
• Stein Roger Sordal / Bass
• Terje Vik “Tchort” Schei / Guitars
• Bjørn Harstad / Guitars
• Kenneth Silden / Keys

Dark Poem, Part 1: The Shores Of Melancholia Track-list:

1. As Silence Took You In Your Paradise
2. Me My Enemy
3. The Slave That You Are
4. The Shores of Melancholia
5. Too Close to the Flame

Pre-order the album here