Katatonia
Brave Murder Day

Once, a friend of mine who doesn't listen to Metal asked me, "To what extent can these bands be dark? To leave no room for hope in their music?" In response, I played him two records, one of which was "Brave Murder Day."

Usually, I don't like theatrical reviews that make room for too redundant terms and big words, but I find myself forced to make an exception in this case.

Describing Katatonia's masterpiece, now dated 1996, without exaggeration is utterly impossible.
If you accept the not-so-easy challenge of listening to this record, you will find yourself faced with something absolutely unique in the entire music panorama, Doom Metal included. Every single note of this monument is a small part of a hypnotic and desolate spiral. The drums have a minimal sound; the guitars seem to have been produced in the underworld. "Brave Murder Day," with its sudden lashes, its silences, and its indescribable atmosphere, is like a black vortex that engulfs, fascinates, and overwhelms.

The first song "Brave" opens with a grim guitar feedback that explodes after a few seconds into a riff that captures immediately with its melancholic and desperate groove. Ten minutes of an authentic journey into darkness, this is "Brave." Unforgettable is the central break where, with a series of brief solos and arpeggios arising from the deepest silence, the anger expressed by the devastating growl of Mikael Åkerfeldt (on loan from Opeth) makes way for total despair (Brave try the meaning of loss / I know your smile / is deadly at this point / Wherever you are / I am not) before exploding again in the end in an unforgettable circle. No less is "Murder" in knowing how to alternate easy-catching riffs with very slow and exhausting passages. There's also room for desolation: "Day", the third track, is like a lullaby. There isn't a single tremor, not a thickening of the sound; over everything hangs the ethereal voice of Jonas Renkse, singing of melancholy, of desolation, of useless waits trapped in monotony (Let's stay here for a while / Is something's gonna happen today?).

"Rainroom" is a mirror that reflects the musical embodiment of total despair. Once again, the guitar lines that support the track are tremendously engaging in their simplicity, and the track strikes deeply, even on the first listen, thanks to Åkerfeldt's great performance (When you said life can't what you want / and I really want everything). Then once more, the hypnotic calm and total stasis in the middle of the track, only to once again leave the field to anger. From here on, you really start to understand that there won't be even a sliver of light, that we are on a descent into the abyss. And so it will be. The fifth track is titled "12." A single number as the title of a marvelous track, focusing on the obsessiveness of guitar lines (the common thread of all the tracks), the general sense of desolation, calm after the past disaster, and representing a gem in the Swedes' career. The epitaph is entrusted to "Endtime" which, with arpeggios full of sadness and Åkerfeldt's resigned growl, configures itself as the best way to conclude this work among words of pain (Now fall into a vacant sphere / Pierced by the darkness / They called it death / And surrounded me with sleep) and dreamlike visions.

A decade later, "Brave Murder Day" remains the most beautiful and representative work of Katatonia's potential. A product worth 100 times all the albums the band has released subsequently and unmatched even in the Doom/Death/Black field. If indeed it cannot be considered the most beautiful album the modern Doom epigones have produced (the extreme obsessiveness of the riffs can, in the long run, become tiring, and certain internal structures to the tracks are sometimes self-referential) it surely earns the prize for the darkest.

No album in this genre manages to recreate darkness in the physical sense of the term and the anguish of desolation better than "Brave Murder Day," leaving not even a glimmer of hope. The only one that might be comparable is "Turn Loose The Swans" by My Dying Bride. But the atmosphere, the primordial despair of this black monument cannot be compared, nor expressed in words. It can only be experienced.