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'Melodeath' = Fake Music - "The Nocturnal Silence" Review (0%)

Buy 'Melodeath' = Fake Music -
The Nocturnal Silence
The Nocturnal Silence by Necrophobic.

Melodeath is really just melodead.

Admittedly, saying that implies that Swedeath/melodeath/'melodic death metal' was alive at some point, something I'm seriously starting to doubt.

The melodeath - often spelled 'melodef' out of mockery - genre obviously doesn't cover a whole lot of death metal, and if you were to ask any death metal fan to put forth a list of their top 10 favourite death metal records, there's a very good chance you'd end up with a grand total of 0 melodeath on that list.

There's a perfectly good reason for that: melodeath is a 'genre' that's basically been cloning itself since its inception.

Swedeath/melodeath arguably started with Carnage's Dark Recollections, peaked with Dismember's Like an Everflowing Stream, stagnated with Necrophobic's The Nocturnal Silence and Dissection's The Somberlain, completely collapsed into irrelevance with At the Gates' Slaughter of the Soul, to the point where nowadays Swedeath - Arch Enemy, Nightrage, Amon Amarth, Entombed A.D., In Flames, Scar Symmetry, Hypocrisy, Opeth, Soilwork, Dark Tranquility - is indistinguishable from American metalcore of the worst kind.

I enjoy some (very) early Swedeath - Carnage, Dismember and Unleashed's debut, mostly - but I openly consider it musical crap. I don't think that at any point Left Hand Path or Like an Everflowing Stream is going to change anyone's views of death metal music, or have the artistic impact of Onward to Golgotha, Nespithe or The Birth of a Cursed Elysium.

As an aside, not every Swedish death metal band is 'Swedeath' or melodeath. Neither early At the Gates, Sacramentum, Nihilist nor Demonecromancy are considered part of the melodeath cesspool of shit. At least by me.

This is not to say that melodeath is entirely worthless, nor that good death metal can't be melodic - see Incantation's Onward to Golgotha or Phantom's Memento Mori - merely that good Swedeath albums are few and far between, often not even considered Swedeath to begin with - i.e. The Red in the Sky is Ours - and even within that tiny bracket, what stands out most is usually a result of combining melodeath with some other style of metal, or even some other non-metal music genre - i.e. Storm of the Light's Bane.

'Melodeath' = Fake Music

Necrophobic
Necrophobic.

The artistic sham of melodeath exposed.

Next to speed metal - incorrectly dubbed 'thrash metal' - Swedish melodic death metal is just about the most restrictive, artistically bankrupt and infertile style in the greater heavy metal pantheon, but unlike speed metal, Swedeath doesn't even have the useful transitional property of leading towards black metal - mostly via Bathory, Sodom and Hellhammer.

Swedeath just sits and rots.

A short parenthesis on speed/'thrash' metal: its transitional purpose towards Norwegian black metal was by far its most important quality, and the genre should have been completely forgotten after black metal consolidated itself. The best of speed/'thrash' metal - i.e. Bathory - sounds a lot like early black metal, and the further away from the extreme edge of the style it gets - i.e. Metallica, Kreator, Anthrax - the worse it tends to be.

Back to the absolute train wreck that is so-called 'melodic death metal'.

At this point a number of people will probably cry out that I'm not making a distinction between early 'Swedish death metal', mostly based in Stockholm around Tomas Skogsberg's Sunlight Studios, and modern 'melodeath' which is often based around Studio Fredman in Gothenburg.

But this is a false dichotomy since modern melodeath isn't even death metal, and barely even metal anyway.

For the sake of clarity, let's separate these two genres: older 'Swedish death metal' and modern 'melodeath'.

The sham of modern melodeath.

Modern 'Swedeath' tends to just be an expanded and intensified version of Judas Priest - or, for those with higher opinions of themselves: Reinkaos era Dissection, Nightwish, Sonata Arctica and Manowar - and eventually ends up just being power-pop music with death growls. Eventually, a point was reached - with Arch Enemy's Doomsday Machine and In Flames' The Jester Race - where the only parts of the music that were even remotely metal-related were the vocals.

What's most ridiculous is the swap of epic failures that happened between Sweden and the United States at the turn of the millennium, as American 'metal' bands would base their entire sound off the worst of the Gothenburg scene to create metalcore, while almost every mainstream Swedish melodeath band from In Flames to Soilwork would co opt the nu-metal genre that America had left behind to drag Swedish death metal even further down the depths of infamy. Some would even dress in 'gangsta' street-wear, all the way down to baseball caps from cities they never heard of and basketball jerseys.

Modern melodeath is to death metal what Dimmu Borgir and Watain are to black metal, and it should be thus called melo-deathcore, short for melodramatic deathcore. Basically emo.

The worthlessness of early 'Stockholm' (syndrome) melodeath.

If modern melodeath is shit, does that make its Stockholm-based predecessor any more worthwhile? Of course not, since even older Swedeath has never become substantially more than an more aggressive version of Iron Maiden and Mercyful Fate with some influence from Suffocation's more aggressive rhythmic aspects, and some of black metal's early atmospheric work, notably via Burzum and early Darkthrone.

Of course, we can break it down further from there, with speed-death hybrid acts like Entombed, proto-mallcore pop-metal like Necrophobic or halfhearted extreme fusion experiments like Unleashed, but the answer seems fairly clear: when it comes to this discussion, older Swedeath is fairly irrelevant since 1) it's inferior to pretty much every other death metal scene 2) no one's listening to it anyway.

Since I'm supposed to be reviewing Necrophobic's The Nocturnal Silence debut, I will focus essentially on their brand of atmospheric proto-mallcore, but the following applies equally to bands like Entombed, Unleashed, Therion, Grave and Carbonized.

Melodeath's artistic confines and ensuing (lack of) future.

Much like speed metal, Swedeath's development as a 'genre' is hamstrung by a set of inherent restrictions to its construction.

The reason why melodic death metal hasn't evolved further is the same reason why shoegaze is mocked as 'hipster music', why war metal went from promising new genre with Warkvlt's debut to joke niche-genre in its modern incarnation, why 'technical death metal' à la Necrophagist is closer to deathcore than to death metal, why jazz birthed so many fusion, and why blues was seen as the logical successor to rock 'n' roll yet is now completely ignored: when you can't break out of certain structural limitations, stagnation followed by regression are the only possible results.

In Swedeath's case, it's a combination of several factors:

1. Chromaticism is forbidden. Without the ability to really maneuver around the chromatic scale, and with Swedeath's over-reliance on harmonic minor 'spooky' melodies, the musical palette available to the genre is painfully limited, and the resulting music rapidly turns into a generic mess of formulaic song structures based around the same two or three chord progressions - this album The Nocturnal Silence, Satyricon's first albums, Behemoth's later work and almost anything by Dark Funeral are prime examples of this annoying trend. Dovetailing this is the reliance on standard, 'flowing' and utterly predictable tremolo-picked phrases - why, exactly, is Dismember one of the only popular Swedish death metal bands to attempt something a little harsher?

2. There's only one way to go from there: 'death n roll'. While I despise hybridisation for its own sake, and commercial hybridisation most of all, I understand that it has its points. The problem is that Swedeath's hybridisation tends to lean very heavily towards the completely fraudulent 'death n roll' sub-genre, which is just regular 'hard' rock music played with death metal instruments and technique - i.e. worthless deathcore. While there are token instances of other diversions - death/groove (Entombed), death/opera (modern Therion), death/power (Children of Boredom), death/black (Demonecromancy) - melodic death metal tends to just go further and further down the rabbit hole into rock, which, ironically enough, tends to restrict it further. The other option is death/folk, which has led to its own sub-genre of 'Viking metal' with a grand total of one band worth investigating (early Unleashed) and a lot of garbage.

3. Sheer laziness in riff-craft. This might be a subjective point - and one very much related to the over-reliance on harmonic minor scales mentioned in point 1 - but show me a goddamn Swedeath band with riffs that don't sound like the soundtrack from The Nightmare Before Christmas sped up and played in tremolo. These trademarked Swedeath riffs tend to sound 'spooky' for fifteen seconds, before boredom sinks in for the rest of the album. As in black metal, Swedeath music uses longer melodies but, unlike black metal, these melodies tend to be recursive instead of developing. We end up with the worst of both black metal and death metal - in other words, candy-metal. It's no surprise that early Stockholm Swedeath is seen as the logical precursor to modern metalcore/melodeath, all the ingredients are here in spades, and all in plain sight.

4. Minimal tension, no resolution. Likewise, unlike almost every other style of death metal - and very much its metalcore successor - melodic death metal features little tension between each passage and/or narrative phrase, as each riff pretty much resolves itself in a circular fashion. Listen to Necrophobic's 'Before the Dawn', and then to Suffocation's 'Jesus Wept', if you want an idea of how this limits the artistic expression of the music. On the surface, Necrophobic has more going for it: leads, pauses, bridges, harmonisation in fifth, a mini-solo and even an acoustic break. But the overall song expresses nothing, as there is no evolution in atmosphere or mood due to the lack of tension and absence of resolution. Suffocation's song, on the other hand, while superficially simpler goes through different transitional 'stages', each with a different atmosphere attached and mood communicated. By attempting to make death metal more accessible, thereby turned it into 'easy listening' music, Swedeath's obsession with predictable melodic patterns - immutable tonal centers, harmonic minor scales, circular song structures, unrelated riff arrangements - only managed to remove the ambiguity, the struggle, the menacing nature, the atmosphere, the reverence and the mood variation that were part of the original death metal experience. What is left is background music, extreme metal neutered by what we often call the 'wallpaper effect'. Music that sounds nice and pleasant as background noise, but offers nothing challenging underneath the superficial techniques of blast beats, guitar distortion and harsh vocals, as it is so predictable even 'extreme' aesthetics cannot hold the listener's attention for more than a few seconds. Swedeath is accordingly not 'progressive', as many bands and their fans often claim, but regressive: taking death metal back to the speed metal roots from which it had just barely, in the early 90s, managed to escape.

5. Rendered obsolete by black metal. While it may seem that I'm needlessly disparaging towards Swedeath as a whole, there is at least one aspect which even bad faith cannot dismiss: its relation to Norwegian black metal. I'd venture to say that more than a few early Swedeath bands such as Carnage, Dismember, Therion, Reiklos and Dawn, with their focus on longer and more melodic riff phrases - compared to, say, Suffocation's linear and quasi-classical compositions - were influential to the emerging Norwegian black metal genre. Maybe not the top players of the scene, such as Burzum or Darkthrone - who were always more influenced by Bathory and Incantation - but there's certainly an early Swedeath element in the music of Ancient, Gehenna, Varathron, Dissection, Rotting Christ and others. If you count Intestine Baalism as a Swedeath band - they aren't, but they do have slight Dismember influences - then you can even add the mighty Phantom to that list, as Fallen Angel is pure Intestine worship. But the similarities between Swedeath and black metal, particularly in riff construction, also spelled the doomed of melodic death metal by way of being rendered obsolete, in the same way Bathory and Hellhammer rendered Sodom and Metallica obsolete. Anything Swedeath does, black metal can do better, and it doesn't suffer from the same artistic boundaries as black metal is principally defined by its atmospheric, narrative composition and progressive nature (in terms of song writing) rather than harmonic adhere to a set tonal center. By the time Transilvanian Hunger and Hvis Lyset Tar Oss came around, Swedeath was more than one foot in the grave, having been completely surpassed and eclipsed by the work of a dozen Norwegian teens wanting to put the 'death' back in death metal.

As for Necrophobic's debut, it is guilty of every charge leveled against Swedish melodic death metal. The Nocturnal Silence doesn't hold a candle to Like an Everflowing Stream, even less to Onward to Golgotha or Fallen from the Brightest Throne.

I would like to provide a list of Swedish melodeath bands that are doing something worthwhile, but the truth is that 'melodeath' is stupid and will probably never get better. It's better to consider the short-lived Swedish melodic death metal genre, as well as its unfortunately much more resilient incestuous bastard child metalcore, as examples of death metal's occupational hazards.

The Nocturnal Silence score: 0/100.

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