Támsins likam

Tamsins likam is a perfect album. It isn't my favorite album that I've listened to in 2019, but it's probably objectively the best.

It's another doom album--turns out that I actually do like doom? All the tracks are slow. Sometimes it moves at a walking pace, other times at a crawl. This album is not trying to entertain me. I like the fact that it doesn't care whether I, an overstimulated Millenial, am paying attention to it. It just tells the story that it wants to tell.

And yes, the album has a story to tell! This is a concept album about the aftermath of a child's death. The child's mother and father sink into despair and become estranged from each other. So, yes....the story is sad.

Is the album sad? That's a complicated question. The lyrics are in Faroese, so you won't understand them. (Faroese as in the Faroe Islands. I know! Isn't that interesting?) The mood of the album is heavy, sometimes insupportably heavy, but it's also extremely beautiful. Some music is intentionally ugly for the sake of achieving an emotional effect... every album by the Swans is a good example. This album chooses not to make that tradeoff. The music is sad, and it's gloomy, but it's also beautiful, and the beauty can make it uplifting to listen to. (I'm sure that I would feel differently if I could understand the lyrics.)

The standout on this album, without question, are the vocals. These vocals are really, really good. Like another album that I loved this year (This Onward Reach by Eneferens), the vocalist sometimes uses "doom vocals" and sometimes his regular unaffected voice. His "doom voice" is spellbinding and epic. His regular voice is entrancingly fluid... after this, I feel a conviction that Faroese is a fluid, beautiful language, but that could be an illusion created by this man's talent.

If the album has a fault, I find myself wishing that it were a bit more inventive or surprising. To compare it to another concept album about death, Hospice by The Antlers--Hospice is striking for the number of new sounds and textures that it introduces as its story unfolds. Tamsins likam grips its one idea really tightly. This gives it a hypnotic, tightly controlled effect that I prize highly in albums, and I recognize it as another artistic tradeoff.

In the beginning of the album, the vocals are controlled, brief, tight--by the end of the album, they have broken wide open. I can't listen to this transition without getting chills. Wow, this is great stuff.