Omnium Gatherum - Beyond
Finland’s Omnium Gatherum just might be the best band to never release a truly great album. For instance, take their fourth and arguably breakthrough effort The Redshift. I don’t know if I listened to any song more than the emotive “Greeneyes” in 2008, yet aside from “A Shadowkey,” I doubt I listened to any of the other tracks more than once. 2011’s New World Shadows is another prime example. This time, a respectable handful of solid cuts, but mostly Melodeath filler. Album #6 from the sextet unfortunately does not buck this trend. Other than listen-to-on-repeat-for-days anthem “New Dynamic,” Beyond has little to offer but Proggy meandering and flat-out duds. Despite coming up at the same time, this band has often been compared to their countrymates Insomnium, and rightfully so as Insomnium —who now share lone original Omnium Gatherum member, guitarist Markus Vanhala— write consistently better tunes. One way to tell them apart is the passionate roar of OG’s Jukka Pelkonen. While his occasional clean croon tends to be hit-or-miss, I’m not sure any vocalist gets more range or conveys more emotion out of a Death Metal growl. But even this unique voice cannot rescue the record from its doldrums. Songs like the bouncy “In the Rim,” with its reflective clean-vocal break, the chuggy “Nightwalkers,” or the mournfully upbeat “Formidable,” with its Katatonic stomp, are certainly nowhere near terrible. They just don’t stick. Even the melody-rich “Living in Me,” with a chorus so lyrically relevant to my life at the moment, holds little if any replay value. These guys have all the talent in the world and broken hearts firmly in the right place, yet the fact remains that they do not write memorable songs the majority of the time. If they ever allow me to handpick their Greatest Hits compilation, I promise it will be a perfect 10. Until that day comes, they’re strictly a mixtape band.
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