Katatonia
Dance Of December Souls

THE REVIEW

For Katatonia, it's all too easy to elevate "Brave Murder Day" into the pantheon of black, doom, and perhaps even death masterpieces. But a reasoned and in-depth comparison with "Dance of December Souls" loses, albeit by a narrow margin.

"Dance of December Souls" stands as the expressive apex of the Swedish group, undoubtedly due to the absence of the slow and hypnotic atmospheres that made "Brave Murder Day" great, replaced here by masterful, transporting riffing, deep, emotional, almost Black Sabbath-like at certain points.

An album devoid of the rancid and brutal atmospheres that bring the '90s black metal close to the stereotypical Darkthrone sound, instead filled with a highly technical and performative varied rhythmic-melodic cadence that is very well thought out, reminiscent almost of Dissection's "The Somberlain" from this perspective, and with chilling, frightening, "clean", strongly evocative atmospheres.

An album that moves in a territory where the death and doom influences are, in my opinion, rather marginal, but that constructs an "infinite and eternal field, where even God is terrified" [quote from "Tomb of Insomnia"].

Three instrumental or almost instrumental interludes, and five tracks in which despair surfaces through a raw but extremely expressive voice of a certain Jonas Renske: "Seven Dreaming Souls", an imperceptible intro, followed by the masterful "Gateways of Bereavment", penetrating, icy, captivating in its opening design, where it is hard to find a misplaced riff or offbeat, all on a pace not too fast, but that does not descend into prolixity or boredom; similar in progression, but perhaps more stripped down and naive "In Silence Enshrined", which, however, makes a central riff of its solid structure its battle horse, elevating it to a more than good level.

Continue with "Without God", which together with the subsequent "Elohim Meth" is taken from a demo from the previous year (1991), "JHVA ELOHIM METH": the introduction is absolutely indispensable, full and sufficient to build almost the entire value of the piece - introduction resumed and enhanced in its energy, accompanied by brief atmospheric interludes twenty degrees below zero. Noteworthy is the arpeggio that even manages to relieve the tension, making this song another pearl approaching perfection.

Almost unsettling the short "Elohim Meth", which slips through without weighing down or consuming the atmosphere towards the gem that illuminates with absolutely raw light the entire December panorama: "Velvet Thorns (of Drynwhyl)", built on two unsurpassable guitar-lines, of the same consistency as a solid block, real sound channels flowing into a glacier. To be honest, numerous minutes of the track flow into a completely different realm, a very fast pre-falsetto screaming, gliding over approximate and almost random riffing, in the style of the worst Gorgoroth, only to then slip into a couple of absolutely noteworthy bass embellishments. Every single note, every single sound, every single construction of this track undoubtedly reveals it to be the best of the entire Dance. Any doubts dissipated by the last two goosebump-inducing minutes, with the song practically over, where the usual arpeggio peeks through the fog and slips mystically into "Tomb of Insomnia". The latter is a colossal track, constantly oscillating between the most canonical black metal and the vampiric (not in a gothic-ridiculous sense, but in a way that makes it particularly sad and depressive, almost approaching the cursed expression of an eternal and unattainable love torment - specifically vampiric). A song not exceptionally unique, perhaps a bit monolithic in more than one point, but certainly bearing the two most catchy and memorable riffs/arpeggios of the entire record. If the first is almost repetitively filler, the second, playful almost to the point of being foolish, upon close inspection constitutes one of the lights that ignite in the Tomb of Insomnia, rendering it a ride in the night, knowing that there’s no God and no hope. It closes with "Dancing December", a brief whispered instrumental that maintains the guiding lines to the end.

Ultimately, an essential and immeasurable masterpiece. A perfectly balanced, sincere, and enthusiastic expressive peak, repeatedly approached, but never surpassed, by a historical group that is a cornerstone of a hybrid genre, difficult to understand, but, in more than one case, more powerful than ever.