So what can we do? Just sorta go off about it for awhile? Link to
an mp3, maybe? OK, sure, there’s one here,
though you’ve really got to hear the whole album played really
loud to get the whole point. Look: every song on it is great. Maybe
I could give you some anecdote about how I was listening to it one
day when suddenly, during the song “Hours
Passed in Exile,” I felt the first line of the chorus rise
up out of me in the joyous, involuntary way that the Bowie songs of
the mid-seventies used to, involuntarily and addictively, and how
I suddenly saw that there really wasn’t that much distance between
Dark Tranquillity (who are the primary architects of the Swedish metal
style generally known as “the Gothenburg Sound” though Gothenburg
is rather more complex than that) and, say, the O’Jays, whose
songs take hold of the ear and booty with comparable tenacity as well
as a strangely similar admixture of pure pleasure and bubbling anger.
(I have “The Back Stabbers” in mind, in case you’re
curious.) Or I could try to wax all rhapsodic about the build-up that
results in “Single Part of Two”’s opening line, which
is “Come with me,” a great first line no matter who uses
it, provided of course that the user has the presence to pull it off.
(Dark Tranquillity’s singer day-trades in presence on the NASDAQ
five days a week, and is getting richer by the minute.) |
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