Vancouver multi-instrumentalist Koda clearly conveys a fair warning about what to expect when cracking the casket on one of their releases under the Swanwriter moniker.
No half-truths, prevarications, or distortions (other than in the guitar mix) are present to muddy the refrain on their latest LP, titled Melodies of Despair- a pronouncement of sickly succor you can feel in your bones. This gallery of roguish tunes sounds like an outro that accompanies a slow curtain draw on a reenactment of some gruesome Slavic folk tale where a series of unfortunate events leads to a small pack of adorable children meeting an untimely and tragic end- each a swan song for the unfortunate, hapless, and calamity-inclined. And if you think this is me simply being illustrative and evocative (thank you, by the way, I do try my best), this is literally the context of the opener "The Painted Valley," which recounts an orphaned Hungarian girl's ill-fated adoption and later encounter with the vampiric noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, which resolves with a conclusion that is, let's say, beyond the pale. Much of what you're going to encounter on these dissonant lullabies could safely be described as progressive metal, embracing a philosophy of composition that is less like traditional scoring or pop peddling and more like reverse-engineering a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle- layered, intricate, even confounding at times, and liable to trap you in a head-exploding cage with a nefarious riddle as your only key to survival (sorry, wrong Jigsaw, but still accurate to the material). Far from being bereft of ideas,
Melodies of Despair is decidedly baroque in its orchestration, incorporating many stylistic and structural inspirations from composers like Johann Sebastian Bach and others of a similar pedigree, which bestows upon these renditions of woe a weighty mantle of gravebound gravitas. The specificity of its more classical components can get somewhat overwhelmed by the spiteful spur of the album's most manifestly heavy metal-oriented passages, but only in an initial listen, as they often surface like a black iceberg in the sea lane of a pristine, white Victorian yacht and floating hotel, angling to claim its passengers as a fresh crop of human barnacle beds in the trench of the abyss- icy collisions of blackened death, finding harbor in the shadowy shelter of Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse, more so than the deformed theatricality of a Fleshgod Apocalypse.
Melodies of Despair is the sound of a final breath caressing the fleshy petals of a black rose before descending to mingle with the miasma of Erebus.
