Cemetary 1213
The Beast Divine

Few will remember Cemetary.

Even fewer will remember Sundown.

Even less of them will remember “The Beast Divine,” the only release under the moniker Cemetary 1213.

Music by no means essential, mind you, but which in this instance I love to dust off to honor the career of Mathias Lodmalm, a definitely B-list figure in the '90s gothic/metal scene (and that's saying something), yet capable of retaining his own artistic personality despite various passed styles and an ever-changing lineup around him.

Lodmalm has the charm of a loser to whom things always went wrong. His choices—often untimely—pushed him toward shores that could have granted him the long-sought fame but instead only wore down the trust of the few fans he managed to gain over the years. From the founding of Cemetary back in 1989 to his ultimate exit from the scene after assorted tribulations and trials in 2005, Lodmalm fought his controversial battle in solitude, anxiety, and bitterness, desperately searching for his place in the sun, for an artistic balance never achieved, for a success always within reach but never fully grasped, arriving either a second too early or two too late, while his peers (and even many who came after him) gradually reaped the bountiful fruits of a happy era where it was enough to pair a guitar riff with keyboards, mix growls and clean vocals, to win a significant paying audience.

The gothic/metal fan has never been too demanding, but while in the '90s Paradise Lost, Tiamat, and Katatonia were scoring success after success, changing the course of decadent metal history, Lodmalm was a second-tier hero, a Fitzcarraldo who irresponsibly tried to bring Opera to the jungle, only to massacre the natives and futilely haul a huge ship from one river branch to another via land. And if his endeavor met a thousand predictable obstacles leading to ultimate failure, beyond talent deficiency remains his supreme tenacity in carrying out a self-affirmation project whose fate evidently turned cruel. Who knows if one day Tim Burton (as he did with filmmaker Ed Wood) will want to dedicate a movie to him.

Cemetary was born under the banner of doom still strongly characterized by a death metal sound (see their debut “An Evil Shade of Grey,” from 1992), gradually converting over time into something more melodic (“Godless Beauty,” from 1993), decidedly indebted to the sounds unleashed in those years by the untouchable Paradise Lost.

It was 1994, and with the release of “Black Vanity,” Cemetary undeniably sounded like Paradise Lost de'noantri (the album is a shameless copy of what the English band had proposed the previous year with the seminal “Icon”), but driven by their mentors' success, they too, along with a slew of other minor characters, were able to reap some reflected benefits.

But if Cemetary will leave one album for the history books, that album is undoubtedly “Sundown,” from 1996, which, while maintaining a powerful and robust sound, was able to shift the stylistic axis towards sounds inherited directly from the '80s dark-wave caldron, even anticipating some illustrious colleagues’ deeds (“One Second” by Paradise Lost would be released in 1997 and “Skeleton Skeletron” by Tiamat not until 1999). It could have been the opportune moment for the long-sought quality leap, yet things didn’t turn out well, and with the unremarkable “Last Confessions” (1997) the Swedish combo dissolved without much regret from fans.

But Lodmalm doesn’t lose courage: Sundown is formed, a collaboration between Lodmalm himself and Johnny Hagel, another unlucky character in the gothic/metal universe, who perfectly timed his departure from the far more successful Tiamat just before true fame, right after the release of the masterpiece “Wildhoney.” Sundown’s “Desing 19,” however, isn’t much: their music exacerbates the electro-goth component already explored in the past, but overall, the Lodmalm/Hagel partnership fails to convince, where the level of inspiration certainly doesn’t reach stellar heights, nor are they able to wrap up those two/three insights in a satisfying form. Left alone again, Lodmalm would release a second album with Sundown, “Glimmer,” which would fall into the absolute anonymity (raise your hand if you remember it!): definitely more commendable than its predecessor, “Glimmer” (1999) manages to be even slicker, evoking names then very in vogue like Nine Inch Nails and none other than his obnoxiousness Marilyn Manson. But the result is the usual Lodmalm album: neither fish nor fowl, although many tracks are enjoyable and retain a vivid trademark. The poor sales response led him to close the project and revive his old creation, Cemetary.

Thus, we come to Cemetary 1213: the slight moniker variation probably signifies that yes, we are returning to metal, though not forgetting the prior experience’s electro/industrial allure. This concept is confirmed by the plastic-looking cover, in which the plucked bird from the life album “Sundown” (which at the time already reeked so much of Katatonia) is duly retrieved in cyber-punk format (!!).

The Cemetary returns in version 2.0: “The Beast Divine” comes out in 2000, and we could already fault Lodmalm that an apocalyptic-themed concept would have been better proposed a year earlier, in 1999, like many other smarter (but also more insightful) idiots did by exploiting the calendar end of the millennium (though specialists might side with Lodmalm since the new millennium officially starts on January 1, 2001, but let’s not delve into details). Lodmalm abandons samples and programs to embrace his guitar again: the sound returns overwhelmingly metallic, almost entirely stripped of keyboards and electronics (except for some inconsequential detail scattered here and there, and various ambient interludes), while the lineup behind the leader changes once more, though some elements are retained from the Sundown phase: only session musicians, since Lodmalm continues to write music and lyrics and have near-total control over his creation. But Lodmalm is an honest trickster: honest because he keeps writing in his own way (he has his style, his poetic, a way of singing, playing guitar, it’s this that frustrates us); a trickster because no career choice of his isn’t driven by a desire to somehow please or at least capture trends conducive to a return in terms of success.

But revivals are unsightly, and in the gothic/death panorama, we find plenty: seminal bands making their fortune with a very specific sound, find the courage to experiment and evolve for some time, and then, as if in a dead-end, find themselves retracing their steps with tails between their legs (My Dying Bride, Moonspell, Tiamat are the first names that come to mind), and in this, Cemetary by Lodmalm is no exception, with the aggravating factor of never producing above-average albums or generating genuine trends. After the ominously symphonic introduction (“Lightning”), the robust distortions of “Firewire” crash in: compressed guitars and growl reappear, albeit in not particularly fierce form. It must be said that the return to the fold doesn’t seem driven by excessively suffocating atmospheres, rather “Firewire” boasts an unheard thrash-metal vigor for the band, and it seems that in a simplified form, Lodmalm's metallic tendencies appear, so much so that we could invoke the Metallica (those of the “Black Album”, heaven forbid). But if metallic virulence in “The Beast Divine” is challenging to refute, it’s undeniable that Lodmalm’s experience baggage prompts him to resurrect the melodic tendencies of the last Cemetary albums and the compelling groove of Sundown.

Hence, in “The Beast Divine,” we find all elements that characterized Lodmalm’s epic and that, in a sense, made us like the Cemetary: more cadenced pieces where the tempos decelerate (“Union of the Rats,” complete with electronic interlude in Sundown style) and pseudo-ballads with “katatonic” tempos revealing Lodmalm's more intimate side (“Silicon Karma” and “Sunset Grace”). Noteworthy is the telluric “Antichrist 3000,” featuring a vocal appearance by Anders Friden (courtesy of In Flames) and a devastating refrain switching between a vocoder-manipulated voice and Lodmalm’s usual roar.

There are several revivals from the classical metal cauldron, which are well integrated into a context where catchy guitar riffs and the pounding drum rhythms seem to aim at a more modern metal conception (although more purely industrial tendencies are largely curbed): consequently increasing the number of more driven tracks, of which we count, besides the aforementioned opener, the bombastic “Linking Shadow” (though boasting a clean vocal chorus), the overwhelming “Dead Boy Wonder” (this must be said deserves an irresistible chorus), and the concluding “Anthem Apocalypse,” which closes the work in the utmost anonymity.

In this fusion of tradition and modernity, some analogies can be found with Kreator’s “Endorama,” which saw, just a year before, the historic German thrashers flirting with atmospheres more typical of the gothic/dark sphere, yielding the same usual results: music trying to please all but leaving us with an almost empty bottle and a slightly tipsy wife.

In short, the usual forty-minute effort that Lodmal, the honest trickster he is, had already accustomed us to: we don’t shout miracle, yet various hints are appreciated, and that is enough to make us enjoy yet another essay on Lodmalm's futility. But as always, his effort will pass unnoticed (probably rightly so). He will take another five-year break, wandering across three continents, searching for lost inspiration, to give birth to another work (in 2005, Cemetary will be resurrected without the 1213 variant), but the epitaph “Phantasma” (which Lodmalm will craft entirely on his own) will also be his swan song: in the face of yet another sales disappointment, our small and fake hero, bitter, will retire from the scene forever, leaving little for posterity, except the memory settled in the cancerous mind of some genre enthusiasts of those years.

Like me.

Sorry.

Sorry again.