153 days till W:O:A 2023.
It happened again. I got totally lost in the discography of yet another band I came to love. I planned to write a quick article about Dark Tranquility and I ended up listening to their music for a whole week now.
Dark Tranquility is a Swedish melodic death metal band and together with In Flames and At the Gates one of the pioneering bands of the Gothenberg metal scene. They formed in 1989 and have been active for over 30 years now, producing 12 studio albums for me to chose from. I've listened to 5 of their 12 albums by now and I fully intend to listen to the rest of them as well.
For this article I chose their fourth and probably most controversial album Projector (1999). Projector features long-term band members Mikael Stanne (vocals), Martin Henriksson (bass), Anders Jivarp (drums) and Niklas Sundin (lead guitars) as well as Fredrik Johansson on rhythm guitar. Johansson left the band after recording Projector to spend more time with his family. Martin Henriksson changed from bass to rhythm guitar afterwards and the band hired Mikael Niklasson on bass and also Martin Brandströp as the band's first full-time keyboardist.
Projector marks a significant change in Dark Tranquility's musical style as they started to incorporate clean vocals, clean guitars and pianos on this release. Many loyal fans of their earlier releases did not appreciate this and I guess this happens for a lot of metal bands who are then said to have sold out, to go mainstream, to go soft. I am thinking of Dimmu Borgir for example here.
I started to play Projector and I loved it from the first second. My favourite songs are the first four tracks and the seventh track Nether Novas.
FreeCard starts with a beautiful and soft piano intro, followed by a very majestic guitar intro. Mikael Stanne starts with growled vocals and gives the song a harsh note, counterbalanced by the melodic guitars. At 1:20 you hear his clean singing for the fist time and I was really surprised. The middle of the song features a string interlude and a slow and doomy synthesizer part with the sole purpose of establishing atmosphere, which works well. It is a great song.
ThereIn starts with a powerful riff, which I don't really like for some reason. Like FreeCard before the song starts off with raspy vocals and is heavy enough. And then the chorus starts at 1:22 and the chorus makes me love this song.
It was solid | Yet ever changing | It was different |Yet the same |So I starve myself for energy
Stanne sounds very much like Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan here and the song is pushed into a gothic metal direction which I really dig.
UnDo Control features a female guest vocalist, another goth element that is very harmonically fused with melodic death metal elements and the third song in a row that I absolutely enjoy.
By far my favourite track on this album is the ballad Auctioned. The opening piano intro is so beautiful and the melody stuck with me for days. When Stanne starts singing in his wistful, longing way, full of sorrow and passion, the song is just perfect. I love every minute of it. Is it death metal? No. There are no death metal growls or blastbeats to be found here. But it doesn't matter. Dark Tranquility tried something new here and they did it remarkably well. If you like gothic metal or anything gothic-related, you will love this song.
Nether Novas is the longest track on the album with 6:14 minutes. It takes its time to focus on atmosphere and contains all the elements that are present on this album: growls, raspy vocals, clean vocals, clean guitars, heavy melodic riffs, distorted guitars, guitar solos and thundering drums.
Projector is said to be Dark Tranquility's most experimental and creative album. Stanne's clean vocals are very dominant and if you don't like it, then you probably won't like this release. If you have any love for doomy, gloomy, depressive, gothic, dark wave music, then you will probably enjoy it as much as I did. Projector has a great flow, the songs go hand in hand and they are varied enough so it does not get boring to listen to it in one go. The individual instruments are all clearly audible, Stanne's vocal performance is great and there are so many memorably melodies here that will stay with you for a while.
I absolutely love this album and I am psyched to see Dark Tranquility live this year at Wacken. And I so hope they play ThereIn!
Only drop of bitterness for me is that I won't see them with their long-term line-up as Nicolas Sundin and Anders Jivarp left the band in 2020 and 2022 respectively. Nevertheless, I am sure they will be great (I have also listened to their latest release Moment (2020) and I still like them a lot).
Kommentar schreiben