Sundown
Design 19

Forgive me, finally, if I continue to bore you with Mathias Lodmalm, but I swear it's the last time: I've done thirty, let's make it thirty-one and review this debut work by Sundown as well.

Let's try to use a reasonable number of words and not drag it out too much, as you don't give a damn anyway. Year 1997: in hindsight, we can confidently assert that the gothic/metal world had already yielded its best, but at the time, we didn't realize it. However, it was easy to understand, even live, that these Sundown, despite the names involved, despite the good promotion ensured by the video clip of “19” (which was played quite often on MTV at night), would be a half-assed attempt and would last the time of a spring fart.

On one side, we have Mathias Lodmalm, the leader of the newly dissolved Cemetary who, despite having a certain history in the field (founded in 1989, their first full-length dates back to 1992), had not managed to capture the hearts of genre enthusiasts. After a series of misunderstandings with the Black Mark label, Lodmalm decided to move to Century Media and adapt the material that probably would have been the basis for the new Cemetary album, to create this project that takes its name from the best-received Cemetary album, that “Sundown” where Lodmalm was already steering his songwriting towards the shores of basic goth-rock indebted to the sacred monsters of the genre, such as Sisters of Mercy and Fields of Nephilim.

On the other side, we have former Tiamat member Johnny Hagel, who left the band (by now exclusively the domain of the father-master Johnny Edlund) after the release of “Wildhoney”: and while it was known that Hagel was not a significant author within the sound economy of Tiamat, the curly bassist remained, after all, the person who wrote the music of a great track like “Gaia” (which later became the band's emblematic song, as well as the most popular one), and some expectation, indeed, his stepping into the limelight could legitimately raise it.

But instead nothing, Hagel the visionary, Hagel the dreamer, does nothing but inject a bit of gothic scent into the commercial sound that Lodmalm and Century Media had planned for this fool's trap project: it turns out that the hill doesn't even give birth to a mouse, and “Design 19” shall be numbered among the blandest moments the Swedish scene has ever bestowed in the gothic/metal domain. “Design 19”, starting from the useless cover that means nothing and the useless title that means nothing, is an album that really leaves with what it found: poor both in quality and quantity, it shows two artists lethargic and nearly bankrupt in ideas, not even much in agreement on the artistic direction to imprint on the project (Hagel's introspective soul clashes more than once with Lodmalm's misplaced showboating), nor even capable of putting together thirty-four minutes of substance. Therefore, “Design 19” comprises ten tracks banal in writing, academic in execution, predictable in their development, except for three or four episodes where the Lodmalm/Hagel firm knows better how to focus its proposal, in any case far not only from the Tiamat's excellence of the time but also from the perennial concreteness of Cemetary.

“19”, the lead single, may also please for its modernist attitude, with that shouted refrain that, in the end, is the only moment that can recall the past made of heavy metal of the two. “Judgement Ground,” the darkest of the lot (fruit of Hagel's sack), gets menacing and mighty, amid obsessive orchestrations, a vampiric vocal performance, and an inquisitorial chorus based on ecclesiastical chants. “Synergy” dusts off the more engaging and rocking Cemetary; “Slither,” although almost a plagiarism of the legendary “Temple of Love,” is a nice dive into the more danceable dark-wave. But the rest is indeed small stuff, starting from the dull opener “Aluminum,” passing through the lifeless ballad “As Time Burns” (always fruit of Hagel's sack), ending with the avoidable instrumental “112/Ghost in the Machine” with its ill-fated metropolitan tones, complete with erupting police sirens and an inexplicable tail of dissonant frequencies that demonstrates the duo's incompetence even on the experimentation front.

Less impactful than the proclaimed intentions, Hagel's work, who, in addition to his bass, takes on the electronic parts and almost all the keyboards, handled with extreme childishness. A poor man's electronics is indeed what accompanies a work that ultimately isn't audacious at all and rather prefers to look to the past, sinking firmly its roots in an easy-going dark/rock, fattened by the annoying clichés of gothic metal of those years (a path that alas will be followed in the subsequent years by Tiamat themselves starting from the mediocre “Skeleton Skeletron, and by other illustrious names of the scene – and in this Sundown have the merit of being sad precursors). Lodmalm, on the other hand, softens his vocal approach, completely abandons the previous hoarseness, sometimes playing to be the handsome dark, sometimes the sensual singer of gothic passions, but bordering on the ridiculous in both cases: in his mind, probably, he wished to fit into the charismatic front-man's part, so much that in the line-up he's credited only as the singer, but in the end, what goes out the door seems to come back in through the window, and as luck would have it, at the bottom of the booklet it says that the guitars present on the platter are entirely played by Lodmalm.

In “Design 19,” in conclusion, there's a lot of Lodmalm, who writes almost all the tracks: despite the artistic detour towards radio-friendly territory, the album could have also been released as Cemetary, few would have noticed the moniker difference. Hagel, for his part, loses big time in the long-distance comparison with his old companion Hedlund (since Tiamat, almost simultaneously, will give birth to that jewel of introspection that is “A Deeper Kind of Slumber”), and in fact, Hagel, dissatisfied, will leave Sundown, which will continue for only one more album (Glimmer, from 1999) under the guidance of Lodmalm alone, who will eventually shut shop and return to his roots by reviving the name of his historic band, with the Cemetary 1213 project.

Goodbye.