The debut album by Norway’s Omit is a monstrous work: five symphonic doom metal songs stretched across two discs, with song lengths between fourteen and twenty six minutes. Fortunate for me, I love long songs (hell, my favourite song of all time is “Close to the Edge” by Yes.)

Omit perform a highly orchestrated, beautiful form of doom. The tempos are glacially slow and the guitars are heavily distorted and down tuned, but laced across it all are various wind, keyboard, and bowed string instruments and the ethereal voice of Cecilie Langlie. The juxtaposition really isn’t one and everything works together seamlessly. Sprinklings of folky acoustic guitar reminiscent of Opeth‘s first two albums provide additional dynamics.

Appropriately, the music is very melancholic and sorrowful, though in an abstract way instead of a clichéd, emo one. The band have carefully crafted everything to build a consistent, depressive atmosphere from beginning to end. The lyrics don’t really deal with their subject matter directly, leaving a lot of interpretation to the listener.

Langlie’s vocal approach is simply fantastic. A trained mezzo soprano, one might expect her to steal the show at every chance, but she eschews acrobatic warbling, instead using her voice in a very straightforward and unaffected manner. There are moments where her singing melds so well with the orchestral instruments that it’s hard to pick out where her voice ends and strings begin.

Drummer Bert Nummelin had not joined the band yet when Repose was recorded so all the drums were programmed by guitarist Tom Simonsen. The result works because the beats are a bit closer to sparse orchestral percussion in style than they are to heavy metal drumming, particularly on “Insolence.” If it were busier the artificiality would probably have been more apparent and detracted from the organic atmosphere.

The production and mastering on Repose gets a hearty “fuck yeah!” from me for Omit‘s refusal to brickwall the hell out of their music. You’ll have to turn up the volume a little but it’s worth it for all the juicy dynamics. The claustrophobic compression/ limiting of most modern music would have completely ruined something with this much organic orchestration.

I strongly recommend this album, particularly on a rainy day, but I must give you some caveats. Repose is long-winded, repetitive, ridiculously slow, and pretty much hammers one mood and atmosphere for its entire duration. Obviously it’s not for everyone. But if Omit wanted their music to appeal to the masses they wouldn’t have bypassed the demands of record labels by founding their own and presenting their vision completely unadulterated. It’s very self-indulgent and I’m aware that a lot of people are put off by that sort of thing, but to me self-indulgent music is simply more honest than something that has been whittled down to nothing.

[Visit the band's website]

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