Things had been quiet around Lake of Tears for a long time, but in 2020 the news broke that a new album was on the way. Ominous eventually appeared on 19 February 2021 as the first new studio album since 2011’s Illwill.
Lake of Tears from Sweden started out as a gothic metal band, but quickly developed towards the atmospheric and melodic. Their albums would often featuring beautifully melancholic ambient soundscapes sitting side-by-side with tracks featuring more intense rock and metal moments. They have often taken inspiration from the season of autumn as well as mournful subjects related to loss, loneliness, and depression.
There are several reasons for the band’s hiatus, including the fact that the band as we’ve known it hasn’t existed for quite a few years. After the 2014 tour that resulted in the live album By the Black Sea, they started drifting apart.
Daniel Brennare (vocals, guitar) has always been the main songwriter and frontman. When he started presenting material for another album in 2015/16 the guys were still around to start working on it. Some songs were arranged and came together as a band, but it didn’t last. Soon Brennare would be the lone remaining member.
Brennare continued putting things together in his own pace. Sometimes on his own, other times with help as he needed it. This work has now resulted in Ominous, which consequently is a more personal album than ever before.
Another reason that things have been quiet and taken time is Brennare’s illness. He was diagnosed with chronic leukaemia some 15 years ago. This is an extreme diagnosis to receive, with a very high mortality rate. Brennare is one of the fortunate ones who managed to emerge on the other side. He recently described his condition as “OK these days. It’ll never go away, but at least for now it’s under control.” The illness still hangs heavily over the album, which is thematically rooted in illness and depression.
In other words: this is a concept album inspired by personal dark factors. It tells a complete story from start to finish. The story spans several years, where the illness as well as the depression that came because of it has been made into two characters: the Ominous brothers.
“I wanted to turn it around in some way,” he told terrarelicta.com, “to make something positive out of this negativity. That’s the main base for the story. It’s about illness and depression that is symbolized best by the two Ominous brothers. Ominous one is the physical illness, and the Ominous two is the depression. These are the main parts of the story but it was hard to make a story out of this concept. I thought about it a lot, and if I’ve done it totally free and without any musical boundaries. I think it would be more like art music because those feelings are very nonlinear. They pop up on certain days, then it goes back. I tried to make a linear psychological story that could be easy to understand in this cosmic journey.”
The two Ominous brothers that he is talking about are central to the story. These are the entities that are depicted in the cover artwork, which is painted by Vladimir Chebakov. The booklet features a further painting for each song. The Russian artist does not speak English, so Brennare had interesting discussions with him online using Google Translate to be able to communicate. They must have managed to communicate well, as the artwork came out great and adds a lot to the package and listening experience.
The album is meant to flow from start to finish, making it one coherent listening experience. For this reason, Brennare didn’t want to put out singles ahead of the album release. The songs were not designed to stand alone, and he felt they would be judged differently if they were separated from the full context. Still, two lyric videos were shared ahead of the album release, with Brennare simply picking the first song first and moving on to the second next.
The album opens with At the Destination. For this album, this appears to be a remarkably upbeat track with a lot of percussion and some drive. It has a good tempo and even some danceable rhythmic lines, but musically you can still sense the brooding and growing unease lying underneath it all. Especially as you start taking the lyrics on board.
The song describes how a traveller has finally reached the base or outpost he was travelling to, only to find it abandoned. With nobody there he tries to contact his home base, but discovers that they don’t read him. He is isolated and alone. This is fairly dramatic, as – according to the graphic art in the booklet – the main character is an astronaut and the base he has travelled to is off-planet. This means returning might not be possible, and the feelings of isolation and abandonment are absolute.
5573 to station
Hello, anyone there?
I’m at the destination
There is nothing here
Reporting back to station
It’s I-5573
I need a new direction
Do you read me?
Reporting back to station
Is there someone there?
I’m at the destination
There is nothing here
Nothing here at all
“I did think a lot about this one,” Brennare told terrarelicta.com. “I wanted it to be flowing, to be like a story. I didn’t want to make many refrains and choruses which could take the focus away from the whole story. It’s kind of an experiment in that way. I wanted to make it all fit together, to flow nicely, and it was clear to me early in the process that At the Destination needs to be the opener. I needed some kind of an energetic start, but at the same time, the main reason for that song is to take you somewhere, to put on the headphones, and enter the story. For me, it was something that clicked with my emotional state. I wanted to feel it somewhere out in the space. So, the main reason for At the Destination is to get the pulse up, but also to take you to someplace where you can listen to the rest of the story.”
The song is a good opener, although I cannot agree with myself if I primarily find it stylistically unsettled or just emotionally unsettling. This might be exactly the effect it was going for. It took several listens before I realised the album needs an opener like this, and it wouldn’t have worked if it had started with one of the band’s more trademark ambient pieces. That will come later.
It is not a very typical Lake of Tears track, which is not a problem, but that factor might make it easier to judge those moments a little harsher when they aren’t amongst the album’s stronger moments.
What the track does, however, is to set up the next track beautifully. And that next track just might be the best track on the album.
In Wait And Worries instantly feels like a Lake of Tears classic. It slowly builds up a brooding atmosphere of increasing intensity. The individual who reached the station in At the Destination has now been at the base for a while – isolated, alone, and just waiting for someone to make contact. Surely someone must realise that he is there and try to reach out. They cannot have abandoned him. The thought is unthinkable. Isn’t it? Is it?
The song starts calmly, with the character in the song waiting confidently for someone to arrive soon. As the song progress, those please get more intense with the instrumentation also adding urgency. The song is masterfully pinning that feeling of growing fear of abandonment.
I’m waiting out here for the morning breeze
The night has been long, it’s been hard to breathe
Looking for something, with nothing to see
Where are you now when I need you the most?
I need but a word in this night so close
I no longer remember the sound of your voice
How could you let me come here alone?
Leave me to wander this world of stone?
It shatters my dreams and it chills my bones
“5573 to station, the system is failing”
This will be my last transmission, the bond is breaking
There is no communication
There are no signals coming in
And there is no new direction
But it must be near to morning
The song is everything a Lake of Tears song should be. It carries with it the feeling of night time and an eerie calm despite the lurking feeling of everything not feeling right, but can also be listened to as a pure moment of lovely ambient music.
Lost In A Moment builds on the previous songs. The brooding feeling of isolation, loneliness, and increasing doom that has crept in from the beginning is in full flow by now, and never really lets up. Brennare desperately sings “The night is gone, the dream is leaving” in a song that describes the horrible realisation that nobody is coming to his help.
The song includes some rather intense musical passages, signifying the anger of having ended up in such a desolate location. Rather than being intense and angry pieces of metal, they are surprisingly expansive and if anything leads to associations of huge wastelands, similarly to the more recent Gary Numan albums which also do an excellent job of setting up an epic soundscape for post-apocalyptic landscapes.
“I took these steps from where I was feeling all abandoned,” Brennare told terrarelicta.com, “starting from scratch with a blank paper, which one day turned into the story. I actually find the story itself energising, and it almost puts a smile on your face. So I’ve lived with a very gloomy story, but at the same time, it was also giving some hope to me.”
Ominous One is where the first of the two ‘brothers’ makes its appearance. This symbolises the illness, and it is interesting that the narrative perspective is switching from the character to the illness itself. “I am doom, darkness and disease / Here with the morning breeze” it sings, the song itself having a solid rock arrangement with menacing riffs, as if it comes bulldozing over everything.
By contrast, its sister song Ominous Too which comes right after it returns to the slow and brooding approach. This is obviously more fitting for a song which symbolises depression. Where an illness can come bulldozing in and just take over, depression usually comes creeping. The difference in approach is as obvious as it is interesting.
Come a little closer, now
My eyes are old, but I can see you’re feeling down
You have come so small
And I am here to take your all
Minutes have been like hours
And every hour like a year
Now every second I grow stronger
As the day is getting colder, colder, colder
Brennare says, “These two Ominous brothers, who are terrible creatures, I wanted to turn them around. I want to make them be my friends, so to say. I think that the Ominous One song is almost a little bit of a love song from this perspective. It’s a combination of these emotions.”
One Without Dreams is musically varied with several riffs carefully building up yet another atmospheric song. It has an ambient feel with a careful build, which masks that lyrically we’re probably talking about the darkest song on the album. “The end is coming” is sung like a mantra, with the character now struggling with cold, emptiness, and fear. It moves over to the lovely instrumental The End of This World, with the title directly telling us that it is the end of the road for our main character. Musically it is as bombastic as an album of this type is going to get, spiced with riffs, layers of guitar, and building up to an epic outro.
“The main influence for the dark side of the story was the illness,” Brennare told terrarelicta.com, “but I don’t know if I meant to make it this dark. I just wanted to go with the flow, to make words and music out of my emotions. It’s quite a dark story, and I don’t remember these times as good ones. It was not a very pleasant state to be, but there were also good moments, related to learning things along the way – like how to work with orchestral stuff.”
Cosmic Sailor is the final track of the story and my second album highlight. This is a beautiful ambient track which at least initially reminds me stylistically of the verses of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb. It goes further than the Floyd in establishing that melancholic, emotional ambience, and definitely never tries to establish a high emotional release similar to Gilmour’s high-flying peak of a guitar solo in that song. Instead, it stays within its emotional boundaries throughout, possibly burrowing downwards rather than up.
Hey, I’m still here breathing
My perception’s expanding
But the vision seems so strange
There are colours returning
Changing as I move
Changing as I move
Through the morning
Move through the grey
The title Cosmic Sailor could indicate that our main character has passed on to the next plane of existence, whatever that is, but an alternative interpretation is that he was saved at the last moment. It is entirely possible that people reached the base in the nick of time, but this is not clear at all. Brennare gave the seemingly positive statement “the story ends more positively than it begins”, but those familiar with his works will know that this may not mean what we’d think.
The song carries with it an intense beauty that can only be found in melancholy, which is to find pure moments of joy (or at least bittersweetness) even when surrounded by sadness. The atmosphere build of the song is incredible. What a track to end the story with.
The song’s final two minutes consist of ambient effects and -eventually – a slight low-fi musical coda. This is a very nice ending to the story as a whole, but it might not please the iPod-shuffle listeners who are looking for a musical quick fix.
There is one more track on the disc. In Gloom is a bonus track that was created alongside the other songs, but it was not used in the story and ended up as a complete standalone track. This meant it was in danger of being excluded, but fortunately its creator became fond of it. “I like that song,” says Brennare, “and I just couldn’t exclude it from the album.”
I am glad he felt that way, as it has a more organic sound, with the sound of a cello adding a lot of colour to it and making it sound like an outtake from Forever Autumn (my favourite Lake of Tears album, released in 1999).
RELATED ARTICLE: The story behind the song «Forever Autumn» by Lake of Tears
As Lake of Tears is now more or less a one man band, the prospect of playing live is less certain. Brennare seems very doubtful whenever this comes up in interviews, but has also signalled that he has had some thoughts about a stage set-up which would involve a mixture between music concert and theatre. While not likely, it is not impossible that it could happen at some point in the future.
It has also been unclear what the future holds for Lake of Tears. It would be a shame if the project should cease to exist at this point, and fortunately Daniel Brennare has signalled that he has started to feel similarly.
“The record is already old in my mind, as I’ve been working on it for so many years,” Brennare told terrarelicta.com. “So, I’ve been thinking about some kind of continuation because I found something new in this style of writing which is not so much chorus-based but more like a cinematic story. I would like to continue that in some way. I have some ideas and would like to make it because this one, the Ominous album, even if it ends on a more positive note than it begins, I would like to continue the story. Hopefully, I will make it.”
Svein Børge Hjorthaug
Norway, August 2021
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