Celestial Season - Solar Lovers

Great gothic death doom with some stoner elements (the guitar). Pretty damn similar to My Dying Bride in fact, both in sound and in genre (MDB for the most part has been a mix of doom, death and gothic, after all).

The thing I dislike about this album is that there are too many short songs. I mean, 4 out of 11 songs shorter than 2 minutes is just annoying. Therefore this isn't worthy of a higher rating. 8-8.5/10 it is.

Written by Erik M. on 02.10.2014 at 22:51

Great gothic death doom with some stoner elements (the guitar). Pretty damn similar to My Dying Bride in fact, both in sound and in genre (MDB for the most part has been a mix of doom, death and gothic, after all).

My thoughts exactly. This album is excellent!
The cover art is awful though...

The first two songs are promising. The rest is rather disappointing.
I dont find a huge MDB similarity here, rather reminds me of Saturnus a lot, sometimes also a bit of early Anathema (Serenades).
The fact that there are several shorter songs per se is not a problem for me. But some of them dont really make sense to me (fading them out).
The Stoner guitars annoy me. The UV cover is horrible.

Edit: The scent of eve is also outstanding. But the rest is lame or confusing.

I like the variety of influences covered by this release (just listen to "Vienna") and the way the violins are used: moanful and lamenting but not too whiny.

Written by Redel on 14.10.2018 at 01:35

I dont find a huge MDB similarity here, rather reminds me of Saturnus a lot, sometimes also a bit of early Anathema (Serenades).

I suppose you meant to write that Saturnus reminds you of Celestial Season There are similarities of course, but while Saturnus have a predominant gothic element, CS are 50% gothic doom and 50% death doom on this album. At least according to my ears

I agree with the Anathema comparison. In fact, Celestial Season were very influenced by all three of the Peaceville Three on their first two albums (more by MDB due to the violins I guess) and they were among the very few bands that actually did it right.

Written by nikarg on 21.09.2020 at 11:05

I suppose you meant to write that Saturnus reminds you of Celestial Season

Actually not really.
I do of course see the chronology of this album and Saturnus discography, which you are obviously refering to.
But for me the chronology was different since I came across Solar Lovers only after listening to all Saturnus albums. That is why I said "SL reminds me of Saturnus".
But lets not get too pedantic here after all.

This is good, in own way we dont need see Saturnus or MDB here, it ruin all, accept this as it is. Its good, underated, If this band wont go stoner, it might be bigger, bigger tours and so on, another good Dutch band in beginning what changed sound(well this did not became soft and start to suck as that other what is bigger) , Good album.

I agree whit Nik , bad artwork for doom band.