You know the feeling how the seasons of the year, the temperatures, the colours of leaves, the hues of the sky, the various astronomical alignments and events across the world seem to create energy fields that concentrate around certain art pieces more than others? In more mundane terms, I mean that often an album comes across that me and several death metal comrades find ourselves listening to intensely at exactly the same time, say, this week. The Album of the Week series aims to provide the reader with quality death metal as long as we don’t run out of albums and when that happens, it’s truly a sad day.
“Dark Recollections” was the only album of the Swedish grindcore and death metal pioneers Carnage, whose lineup was basically Dismember with Michael Amott, of later Carcass and Arch Enemy fame. As such, it has remained relatively obscure, regardless of the vast musical expanses suggested here (much beyond something like “Heartwork” if you ask me). 
The album is an abyssic conglomeration of late 80′s grindcore and old Swedish death metal, with the malevolent lead work of Amott, reaping light with the traditional Sunlight Studios sound, bringing to life the infernal visions captured by Dan Seagrave in visual form on the cover art and Fred Estby’s tight drumming, which unsurprisingly resembles the sharp mummification needle well timed blasts of “Like an Everflowing Stream”, imposes the pulsing rhythm of a magniloquent wave of darkness. The organicism of the album resembles something out of vegetation and plant life allowed to sprout on black fucking vinyl.
This metal is doom, capturing the nerve of a mangled existence, wounding and disease. It exists in a driving field of groove, like Black Sabbath themselves praising death at Stockholm’s ritual altars. If there is anything that the listener finds averse, it is probably the bludgeoning simplicity, able to induce the reaction of late 19th century audiences to Richard Wagner‘s barbaric proto-metal chromatics. In par with the contemporary black metal hate of Grotesque or Samael, this kind of dramatic pacing and cavernous mood does not let Carnage impose much finesse, but as such it manages to also foreshadow the nucleatic chaos of the “war metal” phenomenon.
Interview
Voices from the Darkside
I think Swedish Death Metal is overrated. But this one is exceptional!
Comment by In Da Nightside Eclipse — September 26, 2009 @ 03:04
Great album! Just wanted to drop in and say how awesome this site is: thanks a lot for the quality reviews and content!
Comment by asphyx666 — September 30, 2009 @ 14:16