Metalcatto
I love how we went from not hearing anything from Green Carnation in more than a decade to getting two albums in one year. The Metalsphere can be really unpredictable. We already reviewed Part I and Part II, and though I wasn’t as blown away as many other reviewers, I’m still excited to review A Dark Poem Part III: The Messiah Complex. Is this going to be the epic next step in the trilogy, or am I going to fall asleep? Whatever happens, this can’t top Light of Day, Day of Darkness, right?
Okay, now we’re talking. Part III is active—it throws lots of ideas at you. The band tunes down the melancholy for a while and focuses more on their Proggy songwriting. So for three tracks, the album runs at an astonishing pace. I can’t complain about those. They have everything a Green Carnation fan wants: emotion, complexity, and most of all, engaging music that keeps you interested as long as the clock is running. But then things take a dramatic change. More on that later.
The production feels louder than before, and I should hate that, but it gives Green Carnation‘s sound more sense of urgency—more of a punch. That’s something the band has been missing: a pinch of aggression to avoid the work from getting too mellow. I know the vocals have always been something polarizing here, but Part III has some of the most interesting ones in the band’s career. Yet the most important thing is the guitar work. It carries this album to the deepest confines of the human ego and back.
Right, about the fourth track. It’s… difficult to review, to put it mildly. I acknowledge that Green Carnation is doing the best classical music piece I’ve heard from a Metal band in years. It has all the signature compositional trademarks, and yet it’s theirs. However, it creates such an abrupt stylistic change, and the pace becomes so much slower and calmer, that I can’t help but think I’d rather the band write a whole Ambient or Classical music album than mix these two together. It’s mostly the momentum that gets lost. The track itself is compelling, but the shift feels jarring.
If you can sit through something that seems to be honoring a romanticist adagio, then Part III is indeed an epic conclusion to a trilogy I never thought could be this consistent. Also, as someone who likes Rimbaud’s poetry—I’ve read all his poems in French, that’s my level of fanboyism—I’d dare to say that the trilogy as a whole captures the tragedy of Ophelia’s fate. Give me more albums with deep stories like this, please. Not every Metal record needs to be about dragons and battles. Sometimes you just want existential dread set to heavy riffs. And Green Carnation delivers that in spades. It’s uneven, sure, but when it hits, it hits hard. And that’s what matters in the end.
what’s with the terminator look?
Label: Season of Mist
Release date: 4th September, 2026
Website: https://greencarnationsom.bandcamp.com/
Country: Norway
Score: 3.7/5.0
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