How long can winter colour your every word
From my dusty vaults of unpublished work, here's something I started on a couple of years ago. It's a fine example of my belabored process: my favorite band puts out an album, I have a tough time deciding how I feel about it, I see them play the material live, I finally start to form an opinion in words, I lose a bunch of work and get discouraged about writing, I see them play live again, I try to revise what I wrote before but stress obstructs my recreational musing, they release a reworked version of the album, I see them play live a third time, other writing holds my interest more... and, finally, due to recent circumstances, I get a bug to revise the whole damned thing. On the plus side, I think my opinion has finally solidified...?
Katatonia
Dead End Kings (2012)
Dethroned & Uncrowned (2013)
Peaceville Records
Over the past half-decade or so, I have seen Katatonia's profile continue to rise among younger audiences, as well as with that large segment of American metal fans who don't pay attention to bands that aren't promoted to them by popular sources. While fresh ears are entitled to their impressions, as someone with a lot invested in this long-running band, I must add to the chorus of opinions that have aired about their recent work. First and foremost, I take issue with the occasional assertion that they're "still doing the same thing." This brand of dilettante distillation can instantly tell you how long someone's been listening to an artist. Think of AC/DC, Motörhead and Slayer, all institutions incorrectly saddled with this description by noobs. Think about how different Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Overkill and Hell Awaits are from Ballbreaker, Snake Bite Love and World Painted Blood. Then think about how ludicrous it is to place the band that released both Dance of December Souls and Viva Emptiness in that bucket.
Katatonia became my favorite band in the early '00s, and they remained there with their ninth album, 2012's Dead End Kings. Curiously, it was not my favorite album that year. That spot instead went to Sigh's In Somniphobia, an endlessly inventive and colorful cornucopia of genre-bending mischief which showcased the veteran Japanese oddballs at the peak of their creative power. In contrast, Dead End Kings was just a moving, mesmerizing slab of gothy/proggy metal which captured great musicians in the midst of a transition. True, that's something you could say about anything Katatonia's put out since Discouraged Ones back in '98. Nonetheless, although the emotional weight of their obliquely beautiful lyrics and insistent, melancholy harmonies remained intact, Kings made it especially clear that they are moving on.
Yes, this is OK... necessary, even. It's true that only a few albums have impacted me as intensely as Last Fair Deal Gone Down did upon its 2001 release. At the time, I was a lonely, anxious, cynical and directionless lump, longing for release from a self-imposed rut without a clue how to do that. Too old and self-aware for melodramatic teenage self-destruction, I was nonetheless disappointed to wake up every morning. I did what I could to distract myself from the stench of stagnation, usually a lot of partying (just hard enough) and deep immersion in far-flung music and movies. On LFDGD, Katatonia perfectly captured my then-current emotional state in 11 concise, powerful yet pensive songs, each cryptic lyric somehow echoing in some miserable corner of my life, thousands of miles from Katatonia's homebase.
This trend continued on their next few releases. Jonas Renkse's lyrics for 2006's The Great Cold Distance seemed to have been based on a non-existent diary from my previous year, while the more oblique Night is the New Day expertly mirrored my flattened, detached mood during the nadir of 2009. However, by 2012, I was a happily married grown-up with a decent job and steady income, and my only real turmoil came from thirtysomething health concerns or bad stuff happening to other people. I still craved Katatonia's impeccable atmosphere, tunefulness and honest artistry, but my need to immerse in something dark, rich, heavy and heartbreaking was nowhere near as dire. I trusted these guys, and something less oppressive from them wasn't an unwelcome prospect.
Dead End Kings was Katatonia's first album after their first line-up change in more than a decade. The Norrman brothers ostensibly left Katatonia to attend to family stuff, but have since busied themselves in a handful of uncomplicated doom and/or death metal acts, such as the excellent revival of October Tide). In their absence, bass and guitar duties are well handled by Niklas Sandin and Bloodbath cohort Per "Sodomizer" Eriksson, who recently left the band himself. Eriksson had one co-songwriting credit on the album, for "Lethean," an unqualified standout sporting an uptempo cadence that breaks the Katatonia mold. Otherwise, it appears that the new guys just played the material, while the core of vocalist Renkse and guitarist Anders Nyström guided it.
Although it is a logical progression from Night is the New Day, with an increase in keyboards and electronic textures that I predicted well before its release, Dead End Kings is not more of the same. Most blatant is the mix: the heaviness has been substantially muted, and as a result, the dynamics are somewhat smoothed away. This results in a more even-tempered listen across the album, a complete submersion in lovely, gauzy malaise that in turn lacks the peaks and valleys of the preceding few releases. By extension, most songs didn't instantly differentiate themselves, and some ("The One You Are Looking for Is Not Here," "Undo You," "First Prayer") even lacked memorability when nestled among others with more blatant hooks. The final result is that it's more "accessible," or at least less jarring in its transitions, but I must admit that the album required a curious amount of time and attention before it fully clicked for this longtime devotee.
Fortunately, this did happen, proving that I wasn't just a sour old scenester rankling at the prospect of my cult Eurometal heroes becoming the international attraction they deserve to be. If I could handle the Pabstcore crowd's wholesale adoption of Agalloch (still a shock for those of us who fondly remember The End Records' salad days), surely I could deal with a wider audience for Katatonia. At any rate, fear of a trendseeking crowd didn't stop me from seeing them each of the 3 times they toured the States to promote the album.
My current stance is that Dead End Kings is not the best album Katatonia has ever made, and it is also in no way a disappointment. Its pleasures are less in the broader, comfort food, hook-after-hook sense than in the intimate details: Jonas' effortless vocal flourishes enlivening "Hypnone" and "Leech," Daniel Liljekvist's dependably thrilling drum patterns on "The Parting" and "Dead Letters," the crafty, tangible guitar melodies in "The Racing Heart" and "Ambitions," even the unexpected Gojira-style pick slides in the relatively pummeling "Buildings." The seamless flow of these captivating moments is not unlike the movements that make up their earliest, most verse/chorus/verse-averse material, those searing guitar refrains and chilling howls that rose above the dreary doom/death muck of their influences and made the young Katatonia a melancholy maelstrom.
Even after a year of assimilation, those little moments still had me coming back, and I was far from bored with the album. I also wasn't asking for it to be re-recorded in an even mellower fashion. Even as I dutifully contributed to the crowd-sourced funding for Dethroned & Uncrowned, the reworked version of Dead End Kings, I didn't see the point in further tempering an already tempered set of songs. If Katatonia had to get on the re-recording bandwagon, why not adapt old stuff from the '90s in their new style? Who wouldn't want to hear new versions of "Day" or "In Death, a Song" now that Jonas can really sing? What would "Funeral Wedding," "Rainroom" or "Inside the Fall" sound like if they were composed today? In contrast with these tantalizing possibilities, the easy listening versions that arrived on my autographed Dethroned &Uncrowned CD were almost exactly what I expected: softer vocals, mostly acoustic guitars, hushed orchestration, minimal percussion.
I was just getting ready to file it away after a few listens, when I realized I prefer this new version of "Hypnone" to the original. Its fragile melodies and transitions progress more gracefully without the pretense of distorted "metal" guitars, and those vocal flourishes I mentioned are even more enchanting. Other songs that didn't seem too bracing began to follow suit. Even "The One You Are Looking For..." fares better as a dreamily dreary folk tune than as a trudging goth metal duet, as guest Silje Wergeland's wispy voice now seems to float around Jonas' rather instead of rotely echoing him. Ultimately, I believe the stated intentions behind Dethroned, to explore different characteristics of the songs, are genuine and resulted in a success. It's a "fans only" release, but taken as such it's a worthy companion. This purity of purpose was only further underlined by the subsequent 10th anniversary "remaster" of Viva Emptiness, which is not only remixed so that their most aggressive album now sounds more like Dead End Kings, but includes enough embellishments — most obvious being newly-recorded vocals on the former instrumental "Inside the City of Glass" — to make it a sort of bizarro extension of what they did on Dethroned: an alternate way of looking at familiar songs.
Now, I must abruptly reveal that my true impetus to complete this came when another man joined the above list of ex-Katatonia members: drummer Daniel Liljekvist. This... this was a huge blow. He was an integral part of transforming Katatonia from a cool band to my favorite band. Katatonia's prior rhythmic foundation was an insistent, nearly metronomic pulse that placed all focus on the guitar and vocals, but Liljekvist introduced dynamics and momentum shifts that ensured eargasms from every facet of the music. I met him once, at the merch table in Mokena, IL, when they were touring for Distance. He was friendly and super humble, and even talked me into buying a shirt from tourmates Daylight Dies because theirs were of better quality than his own band's. (The Katatonia shirts were pretty crappy on that tour, like short black sausage casings. Mine will continue to reside in a trunk at the back of my closet until I drop about 60 more pounds. The Daylight Dies shirt has always fit well, and I still wear it.) So, while I have not been too concerned about the future direction of the band, no matter who fills the drum seat now, that unique combination of talents is definitively gone.
The glittering fragments in the ether of Dead End Kings give me something different than I get from their previous releases, aesthetically pleasing if not as emotionally resonant. But big whoop, it's no doubt going to be different again next time. Since their formative days as part of Sweden's prolific underground metal scene, Katatonia has always been in transition, perpetually moving toward something but never satisfied enough to stay in one place. Even without the evolving membership and the increasingly prominent collaboration of electronics man Frank Default (just make him a member already!), it would be foolish to assume they will settle on the sound of their most recent work.
I will never lose complete interest in Katatonia. They have been too important to me for too significant a portion of my life to write them off as I have Metallica, In Flames or Children of Bodom. But, for the first time, I can envision an era when Katatonia's place as my favorite band is usurped by some other act with whom I connect more powerfully, just as they took that place themselves back in '01. I have no idea who it would be. I've long contended that Blind Guardian is my second-favorite current band, but I am too close to 40 and too self-conscious to call a band with so many songs about dragons and Hobbits my absolute favorite. Maybe I'm past the age where such things happen, or matter. Maybe I will never find another recording that envelops me, fulfills me, profoundly speaks to every aspect of my life and helps me realize more about myself. The musicians are different now, and so am I.
Katatonia
Dead End Kings (2012)
Dethroned & Uncrowned (2013)
Peaceville Records
Over the past half-decade or so, I have seen Katatonia's profile continue to rise among younger audiences, as well as with that large segment of American metal fans who don't pay attention to bands that aren't promoted to them by popular sources. While fresh ears are entitled to their impressions, as someone with a lot invested in this long-running band, I must add to the chorus of opinions that have aired about their recent work. First and foremost, I take issue with the occasional assertion that they're "still doing the same thing." This brand of dilettante distillation can instantly tell you how long someone's been listening to an artist. Think of AC/DC, Motörhead and Slayer, all institutions incorrectly saddled with this description by noobs. Think about how different Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Overkill and Hell Awaits are from Ballbreaker, Snake Bite Love and World Painted Blood. Then think about how ludicrous it is to place the band that released both Dance of December Souls and Viva Emptiness in that bucket.
Katatonia became my favorite band in the early '00s, and they remained there with their ninth album, 2012's Dead End Kings. Curiously, it was not my favorite album that year. That spot instead went to Sigh's In Somniphobia, an endlessly inventive and colorful cornucopia of genre-bending mischief which showcased the veteran Japanese oddballs at the peak of their creative power. In contrast, Dead End Kings was just a moving, mesmerizing slab of gothy/proggy metal which captured great musicians in the midst of a transition. True, that's something you could say about anything Katatonia's put out since Discouraged Ones back in '98. Nonetheless, although the emotional weight of their obliquely beautiful lyrics and insistent, melancholy harmonies remained intact, Kings made it especially clear that they are moving on.Yes, this is OK... necessary, even. It's true that only a few albums have impacted me as intensely as Last Fair Deal Gone Down did upon its 2001 release. At the time, I was a lonely, anxious, cynical and directionless lump, longing for release from a self-imposed rut without a clue how to do that. Too old and self-aware for melodramatic teenage self-destruction, I was nonetheless disappointed to wake up every morning. I did what I could to distract myself from the stench of stagnation, usually a lot of partying (just hard enough) and deep immersion in far-flung music and movies. On LFDGD, Katatonia perfectly captured my then-current emotional state in 11 concise, powerful yet pensive songs, each cryptic lyric somehow echoing in some miserable corner of my life, thousands of miles from Katatonia's homebase.
This trend continued on their next few releases. Jonas Renkse's lyrics for 2006's The Great Cold Distance seemed to have been based on a non-existent diary from my previous year, while the more oblique Night is the New Day expertly mirrored my flattened, detached mood during the nadir of 2009. However, by 2012, I was a happily married grown-up with a decent job and steady income, and my only real turmoil came from thirtysomething health concerns or bad stuff happening to other people. I still craved Katatonia's impeccable atmosphere, tunefulness and honest artistry, but my need to immerse in something dark, rich, heavy and heartbreaking was nowhere near as dire. I trusted these guys, and something less oppressive from them wasn't an unwelcome prospect.
Dead End Kings was Katatonia's first album after their first line-up change in more than a decade. The Norrman brothers ostensibly left Katatonia to attend to family stuff, but have since busied themselves in a handful of uncomplicated doom and/or death metal acts, such as the excellent revival of October Tide). In their absence, bass and guitar duties are well handled by Niklas Sandin and Bloodbath cohort Per "Sodomizer" Eriksson, who recently left the band himself. Eriksson had one co-songwriting credit on the album, for "Lethean," an unqualified standout sporting an uptempo cadence that breaks the Katatonia mold. Otherwise, it appears that the new guys just played the material, while the core of vocalist Renkse and guitarist Anders Nyström guided it.Although it is a logical progression from Night is the New Day, with an increase in keyboards and electronic textures that I predicted well before its release, Dead End Kings is not more of the same. Most blatant is the mix: the heaviness has been substantially muted, and as a result, the dynamics are somewhat smoothed away. This results in a more even-tempered listen across the album, a complete submersion in lovely, gauzy malaise that in turn lacks the peaks and valleys of the preceding few releases. By extension, most songs didn't instantly differentiate themselves, and some ("The One You Are Looking for Is Not Here," "Undo You," "First Prayer") even lacked memorability when nestled among others with more blatant hooks. The final result is that it's more "accessible," or at least less jarring in its transitions, but I must admit that the album required a curious amount of time and attention before it fully clicked for this longtime devotee.
Fortunately, this did happen, proving that I wasn't just a sour old scenester rankling at the prospect of my cult Eurometal heroes becoming the international attraction they deserve to be. If I could handle the Pabstcore crowd's wholesale adoption of Agalloch (still a shock for those of us who fondly remember The End Records' salad days), surely I could deal with a wider audience for Katatonia. At any rate, fear of a trendseeking crowd didn't stop me from seeing them each of the 3 times they toured the States to promote the album.
My current stance is that Dead End Kings is not the best album Katatonia has ever made, and it is also in no way a disappointment. Its pleasures are less in the broader, comfort food, hook-after-hook sense than in the intimate details: Jonas' effortless vocal flourishes enlivening "Hypnone" and "Leech," Daniel Liljekvist's dependably thrilling drum patterns on "The Parting" and "Dead Letters," the crafty, tangible guitar melodies in "The Racing Heart" and "Ambitions," even the unexpected Gojira-style pick slides in the relatively pummeling "Buildings." The seamless flow of these captivating moments is not unlike the movements that make up their earliest, most verse/chorus/verse-averse material, those searing guitar refrains and chilling howls that rose above the dreary doom/death muck of their influences and made the young Katatonia a melancholy maelstrom.
Even after a year of assimilation, those little moments still had me coming back, and I was far from bored with the album. I also wasn't asking for it to be re-recorded in an even mellower fashion. Even as I dutifully contributed to the crowd-sourced funding for Dethroned & Uncrowned, the reworked version of Dead End Kings, I didn't see the point in further tempering an already tempered set of songs. If Katatonia had to get on the re-recording bandwagon, why not adapt old stuff from the '90s in their new style? Who wouldn't want to hear new versions of "Day" or "In Death, a Song" now that Jonas can really sing? What would "Funeral Wedding," "Rainroom" or "Inside the Fall" sound like if they were composed today? In contrast with these tantalizing possibilities, the easy listening versions that arrived on my autographed Dethroned &Uncrowned CD were almost exactly what I expected: softer vocals, mostly acoustic guitars, hushed orchestration, minimal percussion.I was just getting ready to file it away after a few listens, when I realized I prefer this new version of "Hypnone" to the original. Its fragile melodies and transitions progress more gracefully without the pretense of distorted "metal" guitars, and those vocal flourishes I mentioned are even more enchanting. Other songs that didn't seem too bracing began to follow suit. Even "The One You Are Looking For..." fares better as a dreamily dreary folk tune than as a trudging goth metal duet, as guest Silje Wergeland's wispy voice now seems to float around Jonas' rather instead of rotely echoing him. Ultimately, I believe the stated intentions behind Dethroned, to explore different characteristics of the songs, are genuine and resulted in a success. It's a "fans only" release, but taken as such it's a worthy companion. This purity of purpose was only further underlined by the subsequent 10th anniversary "remaster" of Viva Emptiness, which is not only remixed so that their most aggressive album now sounds more like Dead End Kings, but includes enough embellishments — most obvious being newly-recorded vocals on the former instrumental "Inside the City of Glass" — to make it a sort of bizarro extension of what they did on Dethroned: an alternate way of looking at familiar songs.
Now, I must abruptly reveal that my true impetus to complete this came when another man joined the above list of ex-Katatonia members: drummer Daniel Liljekvist. This... this was a huge blow. He was an integral part of transforming Katatonia from a cool band to my favorite band. Katatonia's prior rhythmic foundation was an insistent, nearly metronomic pulse that placed all focus on the guitar and vocals, but Liljekvist introduced dynamics and momentum shifts that ensured eargasms from every facet of the music. I met him once, at the merch table in Mokena, IL, when they were touring for Distance. He was friendly and super humble, and even talked me into buying a shirt from tourmates Daylight Dies because theirs were of better quality than his own band's. (The Katatonia shirts were pretty crappy on that tour, like short black sausage casings. Mine will continue to reside in a trunk at the back of my closet until I drop about 60 more pounds. The Daylight Dies shirt has always fit well, and I still wear it.) So, while I have not been too concerned about the future direction of the band, no matter who fills the drum seat now, that unique combination of talents is definitively gone.
The glittering fragments in the ether of Dead End Kings give me something different than I get from their previous releases, aesthetically pleasing if not as emotionally resonant. But big whoop, it's no doubt going to be different again next time. Since their formative days as part of Sweden's prolific underground metal scene, Katatonia has always been in transition, perpetually moving toward something but never satisfied enough to stay in one place. Even without the evolving membership and the increasingly prominent collaboration of electronics man Frank Default (just make him a member already!), it would be foolish to assume they will settle on the sound of their most recent work.
I will never lose complete interest in Katatonia. They have been too important to me for too significant a portion of my life to write them off as I have Metallica, In Flames or Children of Bodom. But, for the first time, I can envision an era when Katatonia's place as my favorite band is usurped by some other act with whom I connect more powerfully, just as they took that place themselves back in '01. I have no idea who it would be. I've long contended that Blind Guardian is my second-favorite current band, but I am too close to 40 and too self-conscious to call a band with so many songs about dragons and Hobbits my absolute favorite. Maybe I'm past the age where such things happen, or matter. Maybe I will never find another recording that envelops me, fulfills me, profoundly speaks to every aspect of my life and helps me realize more about myself. The musicians are different now, and so am I.
posted by SoulReaper at 3:04 PM
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