THE GREAT COLD DISTANCE

I have real problems getting behind doom metal groups who decide to go all alternative rock and inject lots of recycled Pink Floydisms into their music. Whilst Katatonia don't, at least on this album, go quite as far down this particular rabbit hole as peers such as Anathema have, the end result is still a piece which is executed with reasonable technical proficiency but leaves me feeling cold afterwards. And it's not a good sort of cold, not the sort of cold lifeless bleak feeling that, say, the better sort of funeral doom offers, so much as it is the result of a complete failure of a piece of music to move me on an emotional level.