Melodic death metal is something of a maligned genre and that's kinda fair. For one thing, the name is sort of misleading. The connection to death metal is often as tenuous as a puppy's innocent look as you find vomit in your shoes. It's not cool to hold that against it, but there it is. People do. For another, it is a genre where the derivative outnumber the innovative in such proportions they'd be considered unrealistic in an action movie.
Nevertheless, it is the form of music that did more than any other to make me into a metalhead. Strike three against melodeath in some's books I suppose.
This year marked 20 years from the release of the albums that made me a metalhead. Every genre has its seminal moments and in the case of melodeath, it received three of them in Gothenburg in the same year. I am, of course, referring to Slaughter of the Soul, The Gallery, and The Jester Race. Ok, The Jester Race was only recorded in 1995 and released in early 96. But in a short period of time we got what are arguably the genre's three most influential albums full stop. Would I make that argument myself? I would at the very least couch any such discussion in terms of 'which album is an even bigger deal than these three'. There have been better melodeath albums. There have been better albums released before 1995. But do they have the same weight? Gothenburg is synonymous with the genre for a reason.
While there are better albums, there are not many. 20 years has not dented the energy on these recordings in the slightest. If I wanted to get someone into metal... ok, I'd start them on something more mainstream like Maiden or black album Metallica, but when they were ready for what my blackened elitist heart considers the good shit, they'd be on the list of listening material. You don't get to define a genre unless you're good. Very good.
Looking back, The Jester Race was and remains my least favourite of the three. That's not an insult, given the competition, but it feels less substantial than its competitors. By not total coincidence, it's also the least deserving of the name death metal. There is little that is venomous, chaotic or uncomfortable about this album and as a result, it's lacking a dimension. Instead the album is full of folky flourishes and emotive power metal riffs - if Anders Frieden had sung clean vocals, no one would think twice about calling this album power metal, except for that power metal is usually uplifting and triumphant and The Jester Race isn't. It's quite markedly not. It's sombre and bittersweet, an album about the fading of joy and beauty. No, that isn't a set-up for a crack about In Flames' later career... ok, maybe it is. Back to the album though and it's not quite doom metal either - the sorrow doesn't go deep enough. Caught in between, people called it melodeath - and this album spawned imitators like maggots on a corpse.
The Gallery didn't. Conveniently for my secret elitist tendencies, it's also my favourite of the three. This is because it's the most batshit insane by quite some distance. To steal a line from elsewhere, it's ritalin metal, with riffs constantly coming and going as the idea of a verse-chorus structure gets repeatedly mutilated. Sure, it shares a certain amount of the same bittersweet folky feel going on with The Jester Race, but there is a bigger black metal influence going on and as a result there's a fair amount of bite that lifts the melodies all the higher. If The Jester Race is a fading, The Gallery is a dramatic rending-of-clothes-and-flesh lament - sometimes too dramatic. Sometimes you remember it's an act.
Slaughter of the Soul, in contrast, does not feel like an act. It feels like a breakdown. Like someone who is genuinely not alright but keeps going anyway - and Slaughter of the Soul is where they put all of the accumulated stress in the form of short, stripped-down bursts of thrash metal. The debt to Slayer is obvious and doesn't really appear anywhere else in the Gothenburg sound up until that point. The folky elements that appeared on its brethren and the earlier At the Gates albums? Gone. Found in car wreckage, crash believed to be deliberate. If one wants to be pedantic about genre (and this article is regrettably built upon such), it's not really a Gothenburg album at all. Built on similar principles, but the execution is markedly different. And the result is an album that has one of the high water marks for catchiness and aggression in metal ever.
The end result to all this fond reminiscing is to point out that the building blocks of melodeath were made of three very different albums. You couldn't drop a song from any of them onto one of the others and expect it not to stick out like a sore thumb, even if you re-recorded the vocals. Collectively, these guys took a huge array of influences and stuck them into the blender to come out with something relatively similar to each other, but already diversifying away. Comparing Lunar Strain with Skydancer and With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness is a far easier task.
To no small extent I think this has hamstrung their successors, many of whom are trying to marry the aggression of Slaughter of the Soul with the elegance of The Jester Race and end up getting nowhere. There's some decent bands and some nice songs from the attempt but for the most part we've seen a whole metric butt-load of talented musicians waste their time with middle of the road efforts that hit neither because their goals are too far apart. The better bands to emerge in homage to Gothenburg have wisely taken parts of the sound and then evolved them with new influences (all genres fail when the new members take inspiration solely from previous members) but they've been a dying light.
So let me say this to my completely non-existent audience - these albums are fantastic. I bow to no man in my appreciation of them. I know most of them by heart, although my attempts to hum them would be Cthulhu-esque levels of incomprehensible. But it is, in some senses, time to let them go down in the mud and move on.
Of course, the originals will always define a genre. That is the way of things. Reign in Blood and Master of Puppets are coming up to 30 years old but nobody's shifting them away from the limelight any time soon. But then the most important successors to these albums weren't thrash metal albums; they were albums like Altars of Madness and, of course, Slaughter of the Soul. Albums that took the original template and created something vital and new.
This article was originally meant to be a tribute. And it is. But it changed because as I started writing, I started thinking about where everywhere melodeath's gone. And the answer is it needs to change as well. Because, twenty years on, everyone's still mentally in Gothenburg.
