KATATONIA

Night Is The New Day PEACEVILLE

Katatonia’s atmospheric classic, now available in book form.

First released in 2009, Katatonia’s eighth album marks the point where the band completed their slow journey from monolithic merchants of doom into something altogether more tender. While opener Forsaker opens with thundering riffs, the battery subsides and gives way to more atmospheric concerns, music that seeks to attain transcendence through elegance as much as aggression. A decade on, you can hear the the influence of this album in the music of Ghost and Gojira, Opeth and Ulver, even Steven Wilson. And it’s a reminder of the extraordinary impact Massive Attack’s unearthly 1998 track Inertia Creeps had on a whole generation of open-minded rock musicians.

For its 10th birthday the album has been repackaged as a hardback book wrapped in new artwork from long-time collaborator Travis Smith, containing the original album, a second disc made up of the songs that appeared on the 2011 tour edition of the release, plus seven live tracks, a DVD, and the obligatory slice of coloured vinyl. Of the

extra material, the highlights come in the shape of Frank Default’s lilting remix of Day And Then The Shade, and a savage version of Liberation recorded at Germany’s Summer Breeze festival in 2012.

The DVD features a 5.1 mix and high-res audio courtesy of The Pineapple Thief’s Bruce Soord, plus the original promo videos for The Longest Year – set in what appears to be a Cormac McCarthy-inspired postapocalyptic Hellscape – and the spooky gothic nightmare of Day And Then The Shade. Rounding off the package is a 10-inch EP of The Longest Day which, while completing the reissue jigsaw on aesthetically pleasing red vinyl, feels a little superfluous given that its four tracks also feature elsewhere in the set.

This is but a small quibble. As Prog’s Dom Lawson says in the excellent notes that accompany the release, Night Is The New Day was “music that braved the dark while daring to explore its limitless possibilities”, and this lovely repackage does a fine job of continuing the adventure.