Dark Tranquillity
Skydancer

With this masterpiece, Dark Tranquillity marks the beginning of Swedish death metal along with their, so to speak, twin group In Flames. After this solemn introduction, one might avoid spending unnecessary words on this complex masterpiece that has always been overshadowed due to the fame achieved by its successor, The Gallery.

I certainly didn't use the word "complexity" by chance: at first listen, it feels like you're listening to a long jam session of your band in your home's basement: the guitars are often engaged in parallel riffs that seem to have nothing in common with each other, not to mention the drumming of Anders Jivarp which, at some points, truly borders on the schizophrenic as it indulges in some seemingly nonsensical blastbeats upon first listen. But it is with patience that the intricate webs of notes constructed by the Swedish combo gain greater clarity, although this will require many listens before one can fully enjoy them.

One might still wonder where Dark Tranquillity conjured up these riffs, truly ingenious ideas that allow them in every single song not to conform to the established canons of Intro-Verse-Bridge-Chorus and so on, but to construct songs that start from one riff and reach another without ever having to repeat themselves. The compositional talent of these five Swedes is remarkable, but it must also be noted that when this CD was released, every riff seemed, and was, new to the audience at the time, and Dark Tranquillity could freely explore all the alternatives and possibilities offered by the new structures of melodic death metal, without needing to save ideas for future albums or discard some riffs because they'd been done by someone else.

Listening to songs like Nightfall By The Shores Of Time or A Bolt Of Blazing Gold, where Stanne - here in the role of a purely "melodic" singer while the scream-growl is entrusted to Friden - duets with the very talented Anna-Kaisa Avehall, as well as the "ballad" Through Ebony Archways, or the fantastic dialogue between Stanne and Friden in Shadow Duet and reading the dreamy lyrics of Stanne and Sundin it is impossible not to think that there will truly be very few records like this in the years to come (besides, of course, the more "immediate" The Gallery).