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Rating: While browsing the net, I realized that among the albums listed on DeBaser, this “Whoracle” was missing. Given the hyper-activity in publishing by the unyielding metal phalanx present in this space, I couldn't help but widen my eyes and rub my hands (thinking about how much fun I would have filling this gap personally). Those who approach these lines already know these five Scandinavians associated with the “Gothenburg school,” proudly carrying the banner alongside a handful of other bands.
This work is perhaps more noteworthy than the others because it presents us with a mature band, albeit in a genre that has never been known for maturity. Without wanting to belittle the innovative acoustic experiments of the previous “The Jester Race” (1995), in “Whoracle” (1997) it is immediately evident that the evolutionary process has reached its peak, at least from a compositional standpoint. An unwitting witness to this is the subsequent “Colony” (1999), which openly aspires (without succeeding) to the balance achieved in this album. Fortunately, the production is not detrimental, being sufficiently compact, and one can also detect a slight hard rock edge upon listening. In particular, one can appreciate some Les Paul-like sound tones that, in certain riffs, leave heavy scratches on our eardrums. It is no coincidence that Bjorn Gelotte, who also dons the sacred vestments of a drummer here, is anything but a death fixation.
Opens with “Jotun”, a perfectly crafted piece, arranged in the most classic “in flames style”: between tight riffs and guitar jingles, where Gelotte and Stromblad switch roles, stands the scream of the indomitable Friden (here almost effect-driven growl, but capable of an even more enviable scream). Following in the same vein is “Food For The Gods”, even more driven and more “Swedish.” We are then enveloped by the powerful sounds of “Gyroscope”, whose guitar cycles pay dues to Tony Iommi's doom (yes indeed). Once inside the eye of this sonic cyclone, we're granted some moments to breathe. Those of the instrumental “Dialogue with The Stars” and “Jester Script Transfigured”, pieces with which the band once and for all consecrates its raw inclinations, but rich in melodic tendencies. I skip over “Episode 666” (one of their classics), and conclude with the verses of “Words Within The Margin”, a suffocating carpet of sounds where Anders Friden warbles about his darkest nightmares.
A work rich in influences then, though fortunately, it doesn't end up being a mishmash. A temptation that the exponents of the genre tend to fall into too easily, peddling the “more the merrier” for originality. “Whoracle”, however, is truly superior caste death metal, not only because of its unmistakable style but also for its genuinely personal connotations. E accattatevill'...
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
01 Jotun (03:53)
I often dream of huge numb buildings
Jet-black sinister architecture
Being installed when nobody sees
Their appearance so sudden
That few would take notice
And when I wake up
I imagine being crushed by one
Imagining its weight its silence
And the absence of excuses for a havoced life
And the privilege of a 22-kilometre tombstone
Jotun
A body of black
That carried no reflection
Defying its own room
Un-earthly eggs of decreation
There would be colonies
Mushroom-scattered forever out of context
Rising spores from a dying world
To pollute to chase away what's left
Sun-white pulverised desert stone
And serpentine lizard mouths
Pales away the pyramids
Rewriting 4500 years of history
Raping the statue of liberty
Outplays the acropolis
Inverting the fjords
Invades the NY skyline to
Dream its own existence in one single final word
Jotun
Can we identify them
As the flint buried in our reptile skulls
Or the time-bomb coded in our DNA
02 Food for the Gods (04:21)
Shame marries the guilt
introduces itself to the
concept of total loneliness
Sensations repressed
make friends with
Suicidia, and
and here the leeches begin to
suck away the lust for life
Escape takes lead
into a world unknown uncontrolled by all
where borders are erased and potential infinite
Chosen cells, glands and transmittors
blast the body with joy
Astral feet running
up to dimensions covered with gold
stairs of glowing electroplasma
safir onyx and buzzing vibrations
A dead men�s banquet
food for the gods
There's only 1 real world
our earth is but a shadow
Created from a child�s heart, a living jewel
from now on abode for a soul in its setting
Escape takes lead
into a world unknown uncontrolled by all
where borders are erased and potential infinite
Chosen cells, glands and transmittors
blast the body with joy
Astral feet running
up to dimensions covered with gold
stairs of glowing electroplasma
safir onyx and buzzing vibrations
A dead men�s banquet
food for the gods
Cutting the bloodline
re-tie the bleeding roots
to heavenly ship of glass
and let it drift in passive arrogance
in a one-word dialogue with the stars
03 Gyroscope (03:26)
Geology is digging through my brain
A manta engulfing the world
To throw it up once again
To a guild of lifted daggers
Neo-wolf, but older again
Than the Lupus itself
Linked its fur to the Gyroscope of time
A collection of failures
A diabolical sequence of stabs
Written in cutting stone
From the fossilized den of thieves
Our lives die
Neo-wolf, but older again
Than the Lupus itself
Linked its fur to the Gyroscope of time
A collection of failures
I see the nursing all mother
Spitting out a trail of termites
In the mouth of her first born hope
With smog-filled rebellion
Apathy dressed in violence
White, insectoid legs
Curse her lips and her mouth receptive
Only to pain
Neo-wolf, but older again
Than the Lupus itself
Linked its fur to the Gyroscope of time
A collection of failures
05 The Hive (04:03)
April night-time
And we run like muscles through the stagnant nodes of man
Blood-bridges lean towards the gaping synapses
to disarms the stars within us
Hornet Hive-dark
Severed wings in vainless beating
buzz out from an inferno of fangs
to disarms the stars within us
We should have been
so much more by now
Too dead inside
to even know the guilt
Waning Ring-deep
a halo of thorns
Sips now down in the sheets of sharp silver
to disarm the star within us
06 Jester Script Transfigured (05:46)
Cre-age-aeon
new beginnings held in infinite vacuum
Biotronic test-worlds free of inscription
devoid of the echoes of man
noble cyborg savage
In cold ceremonial perfection
more radiant than the sum of suns
with each and every attribute
of animal, machine and man
Dystopia Electro-Heart
the grotesque and the linear
took one final giant blow
into the Ram of what is us
In cold ceremonial perfection
more radiant than the sun of suns
with each and every attribute
of animal, machine and man
Installing awaiting the restoration of unsequenced chaos
We've only seen the outlines of the beginning
and this core, the slowly moving raptor
will make the very notion of Hell
seem celestial in comparison
07 Morphing Into Primal (03:05)
Detonation
Fireworks and alchemy
Genes spliced and triggered
into the future and her organic cave
Seismorgasmic omnipotence
scenes of magma in my eyes
Eruption stones my system
I owe this to the animal inside
and the stiffness that blocks out the daylight
Morphing into primal
I'll cover every particle from there to Andromeda
not forgetting a single location
from the throat of Ibis to the co-ordinate of Matterhorn
My shot is genesis and catharsis
Penetratonaut in a cosmology of lust
Suck this subterrenean creature out
and show it proudly to the house of heaven
With one slight wave of my hand star dissolves
Dissolve my brain
Block my lungs
I'll die from fever tomorrow
when locked in sych a perfected "now"
09 Episode 666 (03:45)
Welcome here, the squirrel-wheel begins
fasten the left hand belts
Remember not to think too much
and your trip will be numbingly pleasant
Non-caring is the easiest way
but to secure a passage to the 2nd plane
you have to complete level one
Their dead-smile lips turn on their TV
while urban gravestones scrape the skies
Rising over marionette cities and marionette skies
This is episode 666
destination chaos
Each and all an actor blind
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