Edge of Sanity
Unorthodox

THE REVIEW

A year after the debut "Nothing But Death Remains" from 1991, a record I would describe as anything but exciting, although not a bad work, Dan Swanö, a notable figure in the Swedish death metal scene involved in multiple bands and projects both as a musician and a producer, leads his Edge of Sanity to the creation of the second album titled "Unorthodox".

From the first notes of the intro "The Unorthodox", it becomes immediately apparent that something has changed compared to the past, and any doubt vanishes when the monumental "Enigma" begins, itself divided into the three parts "The Blessing", "Celestial Dissension", and "The Loss of Hallowed Life", a small "Crimson" in miniature where for seven minutes the full personality of the group emerges, which has finally found its own personal style while remaining faithful to the buzzing guitars and infernal rhythms that have made Swedish death metal successful. Furthermore, in the chorus, Swanö gives up, for the first time, his growl like a true polar bear in heat, the absolute best death metal growl for this writer, in favor of his clean voice with which he manages to convey a proper sense of solemnity and resulting in one of the band's best songs, so much so that the comparison with "Crimson" is more than justified, even with the appropriate proportions, and "Enigma" can be considered an interesting preview of it.

If the rest of the album were on the level of this song, we would be facing an authentic masterpiece, but alongside other notable tracks like "Everlasting (Epidemic Reign Part III), "After Afterlife" and "A Curfew for the Damned (… Blind Belief)", there are others a bit less convincing for a total of fourteen songs that bring the album's length to about sixty minutes, truly too much for a work of this kind. With some cuts here and there, thus reducing its length by about twenty minutes, "Unorthodox" could have been the perfect album to testify to the greatness of the band in its old school period, when its two souls, the more unyielding and traditionalist one of guitarist Andreas Axellsson and the one more open to experimentation of singer Dan Swanö, were still united and indissoluble, considering that already from the next "The Spectral Sorrows" they would begin to express themselves independently. Unfortunately, however, the excessive length undermines the result and the first phase of Edge of Sanity's career is doomed to remain in the shadow of what they accomplished later.