Dissection
Where Dead Angels Lie

THE REVIEW

The time has come to write a review that aims to be a tribute to one of the best metal bands that the history of this genre has given us, at least in the opinion of the writer, a band whose story is indissolubly tied to the personal affairs of the singer and guitarist Jon Nödtveidt, a cursed poet who destroyed his life with reprehensible actions, but who was able to create something unique artistically. Dissection indeed represents the perfect synthesis of a certain way of understanding metal music: they created a style that incorporates the characteristics of the two main extreme genres that found fertile ground in Northern Europe, death metal and black metal, and they combined them with the melodic influences characteristic of classic metal from the eighties. However, what truly made the difference is the band's compositional class and its extraordinary expressiveness. Many have tried to imitate Dissection, such as Naglfar and Sacramentum, but no one has ever really succeeded.

And so, after the masterpiece "Storm of the Light's Bane," where the union between black and melodic death metal reaches its peak, an EP was released containing some tracks previously available only as bonus tracks or on tribute compilations to other bands. The song that gives the title to the record is "Where Dead Angels Lie," also present here in a rawer demo version, a splendid black metal ballad in which the band is able to weave dark and melancholic melodies that inevitably disturb the most sensitive part of our soul. The other songs cannot compete with this marvelous track, only "Night's Blood" is capable, but the furious (and newly recorded) "Son of the Mourning" with its scratching thrash influences holds its own and shows us the coordinates on which the band moved at the beginning. Finally, the two covers: "Antichrist" by Slayer needs no introduction, presented here in a more aggressive guise, since Nödtveidt is growling instead of Araya, while "Elisabeth Bathori" is a remake of a song by the forgotten Tormentor, pioneers of black metal in Hungary and led by Attila Csihar, originally not far from Dissection's style and further elevated here.

Unfortunately, as already mentioned, the band's history is inevitably linked to that of Jon Nödtveidt, and therefore this EP represents the last valid work under the name Dissection. It is better, in fact, to ignore the annoying return to the scene and remember this controversial band for how it was in the nineties, when at the height of its artistic creativity, it created unforgettable masterpieces like "The Somberlain" and "Storm of the Light’s Bane," masterpieces that no one will ever be able to match.