I could draw lines between the songs; if I were feeling brave, I might
go on awhile about the crackling intensity of the guitar when it starts
to squeal, and the balance between this stereotypical heavy metal
guitar sound and the elegant keyboards behind it that aren’t
standard metal synth but post-black-metal electric pianos, all stately
& dignified; maybe I could just rant. But the cold hard truth
of it is that anything I might decide to do with this album is going
to leave the most important part out: its remarkable heart. This is
a perennial problem with criticism, of course, but we who think criticism
is generally a noble enterprise usually manage to find some way around
the problem. We equate, or we equivocate. We do a little dance that
tries to avoid actually coming right out and saying something along
the lines of “this record moved me,” or “these songs
temporarily erased the ugly, empty feeling that the daily routine
leaves lying around at the edges of and across the surfaces of all
our other, more important feelings,” or “I wouldn’t
mind dying so much as I suspect I will in fact mind it if only I can
be listening at the moment of death to the singer from Dark Tranquillity
hollering ‘something has got to give!’ like he does in the
chorus of ‘Forfat C: For Cortex,” the album’s sixth
song, probably its centerpiece, one heart-stopping clenched fist raised
against God out of eleven such angry cries on the album. |
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