By Jonathan Smith

The Plague of Butterflies EP, released by Finnish doom metal band Swallow The Sun, is a nice little package with potentially a lot of value for its price. The title track is a new 34-minute piece that consists of three main sections. It begins with an eerie ambience that suddenly comes up against a thick wall of slow-moving sound before quieting back down again as vocalist Mikko Kotamäki offers up some soft clean vocals. It isn’t long before the crashing chords start up again and he gets into his trademark deep growls, a dipping pattern that recurs throughout the song. Though the second half of the lengthy track seems to drag on and is not as strong as the first half, the atmosphere it creates is very much befitting the suffocating image of a nature-born apocalypse. The EP also features the Out of This Gloomy Light demo in its entirety, and for someone like me who didn’t already own it, it dramatically increases the value of this new release. Overall, the small taste that Plague of Butterflies offers is by no means ground-breaking for the band, but it does offer up more of their slow, full atmospheric doom sound that, when the mood is right, is just the sound I’m looking for.

www.myspace.com/swallowthesundoom

(Spinefarm)