My Dying Bride never made an album this goofy, this affecting. Celestial Season had more in common with Wire than MDB. They used their violin to accentuate the song, to decorate and invest a little heart in it. My Dying Bride uses their violin as a prop. It so dominates it often annoys. Celestial Season's Forever Scarlet Passion didn't bother with that conceit. They had songs. They didn't dally in the artifice of tone poems.
From Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands, a walled-garden of overt liberalism in a conservative country, This 4 member band (or 5 depending on the year) debuted with this album. It wasn’t what it was purported to be. To stick this album in the doom metal rack is ridiculous. It rocks and engages. It’s got cowbell!
The contentious violin lays low on some of the tracks, where psychedelia breaks out in cheap phaser and pig-nose guitar sounds, morphing into string choruses, Mellotron-style. The violin politely re-emerges to get the tracks, well, back on track. The wacky split-brain vocals, double-tracked hard left and right and delivered with a semi-growl, have a loony dead-panned accent that sounds more like Boris Badenov than Amon Amarth. Every track sucks the listener in from the opener, "Cherish My Pain" to the chord-churning phantasmagoria, "In Sweet Bitterness", to a fabulous 1:10 bass interlude, "Flowerskin", that truly impresses, flubbed note and all.
No small portion of Forever Scarlet Passion's liveliness is in its sloppiness. The production is analog goodness, with all the bloom and bottom-end cushiness that digits rarely provide. The drums are Big-and-Loud with panoramic toms rendered with enough reverb to gloss over the drummer's untidiness.
The guitars buzz and roar with ample levels. This is an album where the music is allowed to stretch out somewhat before a rabid limiter squashes it back to +0 db. It’s not an in-your-face pistol-whipping, but an album where the mixer gets the balance right. The band definitely listened to the better radio stations across the English Channel and chased after that sound.
Forever Scarlet Passion is minor classic in its own way. It deserves its cultish statesmanship. But it was also a one-time affair, as Celestial Season left the sound behind and drifted off to smoky stoner metal land to make the fine Solar Lovers. Though they broke up in 2001, they reunited last year. Touring is planned for 2012. Hopefully someone remembers to pack the violin.
(released February 14, 2012 by Metalhit.com)
