Landberk
Riktigt Äkta

"Tarots and the North" (twelve writings each paired with a Major Arcana by Luis Royo)

"VII. The Devil"

Looking at it as a whole, the career of Landberk seems like the result of a pact with the devil; an occult contract ensuring imperishable glory at the cost of the very soul of a band that expired in 1996, but that had already artistically let itself die the day after the release of "Riktigt Äkta", a raw and pure gem from a mine that would mark the ultimate reopening of the progressive gold rush, still being mined today, sometimes with astonishing results. The five Swedes are indeed counted among the restorers of the genre, although in quantity as in quality, they are not up to par with their cousins Änglagård and Anekdoten.

I state this fully aware of the mere two efforts of the former and the substantial decline of the latter, but that does not change the fact that the last self-styled members of the so-called Swedish triad do not have a real ace up their sleeves to exploit, remaining rather stuck at the level of "Vemod", promising but still uncertain prelude to impulses forced, in the present case, to remain unspoken and even to retreat into the ambiguous "One Man Tells Another", the final stage of a process that will deprive the formidable guitarist Reine Fiske of any progressive ambition, surrendering to the lukewarm rock of "Indian Summer", then fleeing through the atmospheric trip-hop of Paatos and finally settling into the psychedelic shores of Dungen.

Such a discouraging history should not, however, eclipse the merits of one of the most evocative debuts of the nineties, steeped in an exacerbated anxiety, effectively transmitted by the funeral marches of Simon Nordberg's mellotron ("I Nattens Timma") and the supplications of Patric Helje, whose weak and plaintive voice seems like a cry for help originating from the recesses of a hostile and suffocating environment ("Trädet"), from which not even Stefan Dimle's bass manages to reemerge, despite the determination of its paranoid runs ("Skogsrået").
 
The guitar, after having long wandered among the trees of cold nocturnal forests, breaks into a cry filled with bitterness ("Vår Häll"), so akin to the Lucretian verses of "De Rerum Natura" as to almost hear them echoing in the silence: «I might not know the origins of the world, but from the signs of the sky and many created things I am certain that the world is not made for us: so much it is a source of evil». And paradoxically, it is when the singer's moans and the superfluous rhythms of Andreas Dahlbäck's timid drums, subjugated to the post-rock ramblings of the other instruments ("Undrar Om Ni Ser"), die out, that the record finally screams. A silent cry and precisely for this reason immensely more dramatic, exhaled from the simple reverberation of the plucked strings of the guitar, in an apotheosis of irrepressible anguish, acoustic twin of Edvard Munch's famous canvas ("Visa Från Kallsedet").

The year 1992, besides the debut, sees the strategic release of its English counterpart; but the language change will have devastating effects on that tragic and intimate style, of which "Lonely Land" is nothing but a pale imitation. Gone are the forests and chilling solitudes, the condemnations of nature's perverse designs swallowed wholesale, the unappealable "j'accuse" against an indifferent and ruthless existence, muffled and leveled by the impersonality of a foreign language, imposed as the rule of a commercial game destined to fail. What remains is the genuine agony of "Riktigt Äkta", a premature testament of a band incapable, despite the heavy compromises, of escaping its sad fate, similar to what sources hand down about the poet Lucretius, who went mad after ingesting a love potion and died by suicide at forty-four years old, not before composing his overwhelming poem, where, amid a widespread existential pessimism, an obstinate glimmer of hope takes root.

«...And just as children see terrifying apparitions of frosty wings in the shadowy void of night and imagine others walking through the air, so in the light do men tremble at things more trivial than shadows. And neither the sun's rays can scatter the darkness and this terror of the mind, but only the study of truth, only the light of reason».