Katatonia
Discouraged Ones

THE REVIEW

A necessary preface before starting with the actual review: this album does not contain daring freak/cosmic/post-menstrual experiments nor acrobatic instrumental virtuosity; it does not contain sterile intellectual musings for their own sake nor self-indulgent claims of innovation and/or disruption of existing music. Those who are looking for the coolest and most nonconformist indie/lo-fi band of the moment or the fetishists of pentatonic scales and technicality at all costs should refrain from listening to it. This album aims to transpose onto the staff the pain of living, existential anguish, that impotence that corrodes and weakens the will until it is reduced to a faint flicker of self-pity. And it succeeds perfectly...

Starting in the early '90s as an extremely dark death-doom metal band - author of the seminal masterpiece "Brave Murder Day", a genuine milestone of the genre - Katatonia gradually arrived, after releasing an intriguing series of singles and mini CDs that I recommend everyone to find, at this immense "Discouraged Ones", a significant album of transition between the band's old course and the new one, more oriented towards dark wave sounds and atmospheres, yet in the vein of the most introspective and desolate goth metal. The nebulous stream of consciousness conveyed by the morbid doom of their beginnings is here partially set aside in favor of a more traditional song form, but not for that reason more banal.

The album opens with the dreary spite of the compelling "I Break", perhaps the most energetic piece of the lot. Renske's unmistakable voice, one of the most expressive in all of rock, is a subdued and heartrending sob, a visceral anthem to resignation and nihilistic self-annihilation. Eerie in the neurotic metropolitan alienation of "nerve" and in the chilling chants of the beautiful "Saw You Drown" - perhaps the best song ever written by Katatonia - it evokes moments of evocative contemplation in the crepuscular stases of "deadhouse" (another highlight of the album). "Gone" (just over two minutes long) expresses - with the peculiar guitar minimalism that is somewhat the band's trademark - the lacerating regret and impotent anger in the face of losing something that fleetingly but intensely belonged to us, only to vanish forever from our lives. It is a decadent and unhealthy universe, that of Katatonia; an urban fresco of desolate transience, of deaf indifference, of the aching volatility of affections and relationships. The subdued "Instrumental", a diaphanous dance of changing night flames, and "Last Resort", with its funereal and introspective pace, also deserve mention.

In conclusion, an album to be lived rather than listened to, not reducible to a mere scale of numerical values and destined to evoke strongly contrasting emotions: indifference or total adoration, no middle ground.