Sitting on the floor drinking tea

Katatonia – Dance of December Souls

I was revisiting all my Katatonia albums leading up to the release of Dead End Kings and their concert in San Francisco. I’ve never managed to get into the band's early death metal material. The couple songs I’ve heard from Brave Murder Day sound good, but listening to Mikael Akerfeldt fronting a different band is kind of like watching Kiefer Sutherland in The Sentinel. I'm sure he still saves the world. As for Dance of December Souls, it’s just never grabbed me one way or the other. Seems about time to figure out whether it’s any good.

Last night I was walking around outside listening to it a little drunk and decided that it just wasn’t interesting and I should give up continually trying to get into it. But then today it seemed kind of promising. So the jury is still out for now. I’m a little jaded towards some of the melodies and acoustic noodling that’s scattered about. But all my old melodic death metal albums remain favorites year after year, so maybe it's my attitude that's the problem.

Today is the Day – Pain is a Warning

Although I’ve still never heard the first 3 Today is The Day albums (which are supposed to be some of their best), I’m a pretty massive fan of the ones I do have. Pain is a Warning was a huge departure from their previous albums, which were twisted and complex – both musically and structurally. Then Steve Austin decided to do a 180 and release a stripped down, nearly minimalist work which feels a lot like a rock and roll album, albeit one that’s been charred over an open flame.

I felt like I was being really creative with that description until I realized there is a big flame on the album cover…

As much as I love (and may even prefer) albums like Kiss the Pig or Temple of the Morning Star, economical writing and conceptual simplicity goes a long way towards making an album feel cohesive. This is the one Today is the Day album which always holds me until the end, even when I didn’t plan to listen to the whole thing. The aggressive parts of the album are broken up by more restrained songs where Steve Austin actually let’s loose some tortured crooning. Never saw that coming, but it really works. These songs (title track, Remember to Forget, This is You) are a few of my favorites. The other clear highlight is “Slave to Serenity”. I think there’s a total of two riffs, with one of them making up 80% of the song. But I literally can’t get enough. Epic.

Strapping Young Lad

I saw The Devin Townsend Project with Katatonia the other night, and I didn’t like it very much at all. A major feature of the performance was a backdrop video of Ziltoid, the omniscient alien who demands Earth’s greatest cup of coffee and attacks when it fails to meet his expectations. During the soundcheck he was singing songs about mangos and interviewing people.  Couple this with the rest of Devin Townsend’s crazy/weird/ironic shtick, and I just wasn’t taking it very seriously. It didn’t sound very impressive – but in retrospect I think this was partially the bits of foam stuck in my ears because to be fair, I wasn’t picking up the subtleties of Katatonia’s compositions either. I just happen to already know what those are.

I listened to some of Devin Townsend’s stuff yesterday and I actually thought it seemed pretty decent, so I was inspired to revisit Strapping Young Lad which I previously thought I had grown out of (after a very short affair with it  some 8 years ago). Well, it’s actually not bad at all! I ended up listening to most of the album. Funny that thinking the concert sucked is the thing that's getting me to listen to Devin Townsend again.

Incantation – Onward to Golgotha

Not much to say about this one – it’s one of the all time classics of death metal. It’s the music that I most associate with my year studying at Cambridge, along with Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans. Yes seems like a slightly more conventional association. But what can I say? Nothing spells Onward to Golgotha like walking by this all the time:

I’m kidding, relax. I’m not going to go all Varg next time I’m there. Wood stave churches are a lot easier to deal with anyway.

Enslaved – Vikingligr Veldi

I kind of like the progressive-black metal thing Enslaved does these days (I have Isa and Vertabrae). Haven’t listened to this very much, and it didn’t score itself any extra points today. Like Katatonia, Enslaved is yet another in the list of black metal and melodic death metal bands who went onto broader things, but whose early work is raved about on Metal Archives. I can’t tell if it’s just the elitism and tunnel vision of death and black metal purists, or if there really is some genius in these albums which I find relatively inaccessible or superficially uninteresting.

Dark Tranquillity – Haven

If there’s anything the keyboard work on Dead End Kings reminds me of, it’s late period Dark Tranquillity. I think Katatonia does it more tastefully – as proficient and enjoyable as albums like Fiction and We are the Void are, they’re always served with a touch too much cheese.

Haven was their first album to fully integrate keyboards, and it’s more midpaced than everything that came later. I’ve always liked it but never felt the magic. I have a feeling it may have more to offer – and now that I’m revisiting it I hear some subtleties I hadn’t previously noticed. It’s possible that I haven’t heard this since I started using decent headphones a few years ago.

Incantation – Primordial Domination

I know I was kind of dismissive about this album in a recent post, but I keep wanting to listen to it so obviously it can’t be that bad. I do think John McEntee's vocals were better on Decimate Christendom. A lot of people wish Craig Pillard was back so they probably like his deeper tone on this album, but I find them less expressive this way. Otherwise, I just wish the guitar tone wasn’t so clean and that the bass was more prominent. Diabolical Conquest was the album that made me love this band, and a big part of the reason was because of the prominent, popping bass tone which to my ears adds a lot of color to the sonic palette. I feel like I'm always walking this fine line between being descriptive and sounding like a douchebag. 

Anyway, I’m not a fan of the homogenous thick wall of bass and guitar that most bands use – sure, it’s “heavier” but it’s also less interesting. I’ve revisited a number of death metal albums that I love and eventually realized that the distinct sonic presence of the bass was unconsciously playing a huge role. Cryptopsy’s None So Vile comes to mind. I always thought the album sounded awesomely chaotic and it's not just the slightly sloppy drumming that does it.

Anyway, just to harp on the point a little more, in retrospect Diabolical Conquest might even be the single album most responsible for bringing my focus in death metal away from the riffs themselves and towards a more holistic view.

Incantation has a new album coming out this winter - Vanquish in Vengeance. I just came across this track they released last year as part of a split that I didn't know about. I actually think it sounds awesome so hopefully that's a good sign for their next one.

Mayhem – Live in Leipzig

This is the only Mayhem release to feature the vocals of the infamous Dead, and I won’t deny that I bought it for that reason. Apparently he would do things like bury his clothes and then dig them up to wear on stage, and carry around a plastic bag with a dead bird in it and smell it so he could sing with the “stench of death in his nostrils”.

Obviously I was hopeful that this would be the pinnacle of black metal vocals, but if I’m honest they seem kind of run of the mill.

I used to buy every live album by bands I liked as a completist, but I never listened to them much. I always looked at them as collections of tracks from other albums, but I try to approach them as standalone musical statements now. Live in Leipzig is a good one for that considering it’s a lineup that never recorded in the studio. It’s a pretty messy and lo-fi affair, but in a different way from how second wave black metal studio albums are lo-fi. The aesthetic is slowly growing on me.

Vader – Live in Japan

Live in Japan seems competent but I don’t see a real reason to listen to it over the studio albums. But even as I’m typing this I realize I’m not following my own dictum about how I should approach live albums. I don’t know that I’ve ever listened to this without comparing it to the studio recordings. To be fair, most death metal bands just go up there and parrot their albums. On the other hand, contrary to popular opinion I think successful death metal is just as reliant on atmosphere and aesthetics as black metal is. Basically I just need to listen to this a bunch of times before judging it. I’ve owned it for long enough, it’s about time. It's not as bad as Neurosis’ Live in Stockholm though…I don’t know if I’ve heard the complete album once. I used to be such a moron about buying CD’s.