Look, I will freely admit that I am a Gaerea fanboy. I was hooked on their particular brand of modern melodic black metal since their debut EP Unsettling Whispers. In 2020, I celebrated their full-length record Limbo, raving about their polished execution of raw emotion. My review for Limbo can be found HERE. Following that, in 2022 I got my hands on Mirage and continued to fangirl over yet another victorious addition to their catalog. I spewed forth more praise calling the record an innovative package of despair and melancholy, explosive and carnal, a story of beautiful suffering. That review can be read in full HERE.

It is no wonder then that I was frothing at the mouth to get my claws into their latest, the brand spanking new Coma. Good god, that album art is exactly that, art. It is absolutely gorgeous!

To head off your expectations at the start, the level of saccharine lauding I levied at both Limbo and Mirage will not be present on Coma. I did not enjoy Coma nearly as much as the aforementioned records. Nobody is more disappointed at that realization than I am.

The first single “World Ablaze” was my first sign of worry, as Gaerea was clearly trying to wade into different waters. While maintaining familiar anchoring elements of what makes the expected Gaerea sound, “World Ablaze” felt positively less bleak than their previous tracks. Their second single, “Hope Shatters” felt more comfortable within my spectrum of expectations of a Gaerea track, but there was still something missing, and I could not quite put a finger on it, which rankled my music academic brain.

Album openers “The Poet’s Ballad” and “Suspended” did a lot of work to regain my faith in this new iteration of Gaerea, with pummeling tremolo-picked riffs, grandiose vocals, and aggressive drumwork. Interspersed with the singles still gave me a sense of mixing familiar elements with newer steps, and I was still generally on board. It is with the Behemoth-esque opener in the title track “Coma” that I began to worry. With an increased focus on theatric layering with string arrangements and bombastic cheers, the track felt like a modern Behemoth B-side, and I do not use that as a compliment, as I am not a fan of the direction Behemoth has gone. Still, “Coma” redeems itself reasonably well with more aggressive sections, especially towards the end. But I could not shake off the foreboding feeling that Coma was not grabbing me as quickly and strongly as their previous records.

After a couple of listens, I think I have figured out why Coma will not get as much play time for me as both Limbo and Mirage. This record falters in two key songwriting facets which subconsciously makes a record enjoyable for me: density and momentum.

One of the primary reasons I loved both Limbo and Mirage was that I felt that the songwriting and production had an immense weight to them. A density of layers of sound expertly arranged together to gather and push you through from section to section, with each successive arrangement building upon the central leitmotif to provide tracks that flowed in a way that was both well-crafted and enjoyable. The other thing I look for in my extreme metal (more so in modern iterations) is a sense of push-forward momentum to the sections, tracks, and record. One of the places that I felt held back Coma was that the songwriting kept staggering the overall momentum of the tracks and roughed up the entire pacing of the record. Middling tempos do not extreme metal make; either push me through a high-octane meatgrinder or stomp on me with elephantine chugs.

A stark example of the middling-pace-of-mediocre-death is “Wiltered Flower”. Assumedly written as a black metal ballad, the track treads paths already cemented by bands like Harakiri For The Sky, Karg, Der Weg Einer Freiheit, and others, to higher acclaim. I do not think the slower side of melancholy is where Gaerea does its best work. With generic chord progressions, I had a distinct feeling of “been here heard that” with tracks like “Wilted Flower”. The addition of clean vocals was a HUGE miss for me. The choice of opting for a My Dying Bride/Woods of Ypres esque doomy laced vocal tone felt jarring in a displeasing way because it felt like an amateur recreation of a more developed sound. Either they ditch the idea of clean vocals on subsequent releases, or spend significant time honing their clean vocal chops.

The songwriting on Coma felt more rehashed and downgraded than their previous records. Where Limbo focused on a sense of rawness, Mirage gave you a more polished blade to cut yourself with. If Limbo was a razorwire, and Mirage was a scalpel, Coma feels more like chafing sandpaper. The melodies are overly simplistic, with several instances of odd note choices defying sonic expectations, not in a pleasing way. That along with lengthy sections of mid-paced snoozing like on “Shapeshifter” with generic moody reverbed clean passages lifted straight from post-rock/metal playbooks.  While “Unknown” and “Kingdom of Thorns” had a few interesting arrangements, the central arpeggio of these tracks was almost “happy” and not a wee bit metalcore-y, but it was different enough for me to take note. Sadly, we are dumped right into Harakiri-lite territory, this time with added keyboard pizzazz. Gaerea’s insistence on stalling any gained momentum by hard-cutting an intense section into a “clean” section is only fun the first time. When it happened on nearly every track on Coma it left me with a very bland tasting aftertaste. Overall, much of the “bite” and ferocity that was present in Limbo and Mirage seem to have been scaled back with Coma and I found myself yearning for something more, just more.

Much of these songwriting changes are perhaps attributed to new members being added to the lineup. Gaerea has opted for the Mgla-esque masked anonymity in their lineup, but from band pictures and music videos, we know the band has at least a different guitar player. The vocals have always been front and center in any Gaerea record, I have praised the aggression and variety of vocals on their previous records and Coma provides much of the same oomph, minus those cleans (and I do not consider myself averse to clean vocals in my extreme metal). In praise, the drummer is absolutely holding the Gaerea boat above water. He is single-handedly giving the tracks as much brutality and momentum as is physically possible but is sadly strangled by some of the songwriting choices, especially when the guitars get into that mid-paced drudgery.

Coma is a great entry point for people unfamiliar with the Gaerea sound and catalog. While an enjoyable record, it fails to capture what made Mirage and Limbo near-masterpieces almost breaking through into a new subgenre of modern black metal. With simpler melodies and momentum-breaking clean passages, Coma felt more like its name suggested. A more scaled-back product. One can only hope they find some of that previously stacked energy for their next release.