Hard to believe, but Norwegian’s own Green Carnation has been around for 36 years since their formation in 1990. Going from death metal, death-doom, progressive doom, then gothic metal, melancholic, and back to the progressive roots once more. The band have unleashed seven studio albums from 2000 to 2025 and they show no sign of slowing down. Their next chapter in the Dark Poem saga is Sanguis, which is a follow-up to last year’s The Shores of Melancholia. And if you think, this is going to be a lovey-dopey, happy go lucky My Little Pony album, think again.
The themes on the Sanguis, which in Latin means “Blood”, details subjects on trauma, abuse, loneliness, forgiveness, and the search for peace. While the first album tackles about the march of time, Sanguis hits hard in those issues the band tackle head on their eighth studio album.
Released on the Season of Mist label, Sanguis goes for the jugular with its metallic arrangements, dooming atmospheres, horrifying alternative film scores, it’s like witnessing the group of survivors from Gail Simone’s Leaving Megalopolis, who are trying to escape the dystopian, post-nightmarish city of Megalopolis. A city where superheroes belonged to the public, have gone completely mad, hunting their citizens to kill and prey.
And that’s what Green Carnation has created, an imaginative movie for listeners to view inside their head. Listening to this album, you feel as if you don’t want to witness the disturbing images the band tackle, but you got to view to see what is going on in this parallel universe.
The eruptive blast of pounding drums, riffs, and leads behind ‘Sweet to the Point of Bitter’, creates the subject of PTSD and someone going through the emotional cracks that people come home from the war or in Batgirl’s shoes as she’s walking again, returning to the cowl, but the haunting nightmares from the Killing Joke, hits hard for Barbara Gordon.
There’s the symphonic approach in the arrangements, a waltz-like score, and focusing to get the mission done and not let the nightmares hit your brain and not have a mental breakdown. Hearing sound clips from David Lynch’s ‘Dune’ in the background in the introduction to ‘Loneliness Untold, Loneliness Unfold’ does bring back memories, watching the movie on VHS many years ago.
But the gentle, darken guitar melody sets up the gothic atmosphere viewing the severe depression and the loss of a loved one, being trapped inside this lonely house and not being sure on how to move forward and trying to remember the good moments you had with them. The uplifting ascending towards the heavens for ‘I Am Time’ sees the Green’s in their prog-rock momentum with keyboards for a brief moment heading into the blue sky, but going at 600 miles per hour with its blistering 3/4 time signature structure in a way the band go in this ramming speed momentum.
With ‘Fire In Ice’ we see Green Carnation tackling the nod that Tool had done between 10,000 Days, Undertow, and Lateralus, but with a powder-kegging twist that speaks for a brief moment of the power metal genre. That was unexpected, but cool at the same time for them to do that. It hints the about the emotional numbness and as I’ve said earlier, finding the light at the end of the tunnel to search for a new beginning.
And it becomes a fight for survival in the composition with its blaring sound that gives it that electrical juice which it badly needs by showing other metal bands in the words of Huntrix from the movie KPop Demon Hunters, how it’s done, done, done! ‘Lunar Tale’ closes the album with its strings and lullaby-like farewell into the unknown and the pain to say goodbye.
Sanguis is harder, edgier, powerful, and it still manages to see what the band will do next for the third and final chapter in the Dark Poem saga that waits for us. It’s the work of a band that have captured the raw edges of life by focusing it to move forward and not look back.
