A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE, PART II: DARKENED, DAGOBA, DELIRIA, DARK TRANQUILLITY

(Still catching up with releases earlier in this year, but edging closer to the present, DGR has compiled four extensive reviews in the following column, forsaking the rest of the alphabet and delving into the new albums by Darkened, Dagoba, Deliria, and Dark Tranquillity)

To keep the introductory masturbation short: why I’m doing this is largely covered in Part One of this catching-up series. Every year there are a shit-ton of releases and a shit-ton more coming. We do our damndest to try and keep up but as the seasons change so too must we often cut anchor and get the fuck out here and onward to other coverage.

There are a lot of releases, though, that I swear up and down I am going to write about, to the point where tardiness of said review doesn’t matter nearly as much to me as it does getting the name out to people and seeing what they think. The interesting part lies in the conversation that follows, not necessarily just how late I was to the bus – sometimes to the point of the city removing that particular bus route altogether.

This latest batch, at the very least, isn’t as determined to be stuck in the month of May, and I even managed to get one that could be described as almost recent! Almost. That doesn’t mean I didn’t drunkenly stumble my way into a theme anyway.

DARKENED – DEFILERS OF THE LIGHT

There are things in life that you can tell are only going to be amusing to a handful of people. My sense of this is that if I find it amusing, it is highly likely there are maybe twelve others across the globe for whom the situation is going to provide a sensible chuckle, particularly when it comes to the realm of coincidence.

June 14th, 2024 provided one such time, wherein we saw releases from not one Darkend… but two… as the international death metal group Darkened also put out an album on the exact same date, as if to say that the singular skeleton present on the aforementioned black metal act’s cover art for Viaticum wasn’t enough; June 14th was deserving of six, and they would be more than happy to provide the other five with their new album Defilers Of The Light.

The every-two-year album cadence waits for no man and Darkened have shown themselves more than happy to oblige. Defilers Of The Light is the group’s third album since their inception, and save for a change as to who sits behind the drum kit – as of 2022 – the group’s lineup has remained fairly stable. The story that seems to be developing with Darkened – as evidenced by Defilers Of The Light – is that of a band that seems to be getting better with every album.

Theirs is a path charted by forged iteration rather than sudden innovation. Their existence owes a lot to the more melodically minded death metal groups of old and they’ve made it fairly clear that they exist purely because there is a blueprint already present to follow; where they have chosen to iterate on it and how they assemble particular building blocks is what has made it so they can thrive. It helps in some ways, because once you’ve admitted you’re already standing on the shoulders of giants then music becomes a lot easier to ply to your will, as the pieces are already there. The engine is already built and installed, it is now your job to get the infernal machine rolling from there.

Each Darkened album has taken on a different facet of death metal since their inception. Like mentioned above, they’ve already started from a pretty well-laid-out blueprint and so each iteration has felt like an era of the stompier side of Swedish death metal of old – and in a few cases, the British death metal scene of old, given how much the two have become oddly intertwined over the past few years, with the musicians hailing from both crossbreeding into different projects – held up to a mirror and reflected into modern times.

This is still true with Defilers Of The Light but this is also the most distinctly modern sounding of the group’s death metal triptych so far. Defilers Of The Light is punctuated with massive, mammoth-like grooves wherein each footfall can leave an imprint hammered into cement and just as many galloping riffs to conjure imagery of a hippopotamus herd trampling through a small city. It may just be that this was a cauldron constantly boiling as an undercurrent to Darkened‘s sound and it has finally boiled over, but coupled with their clear expertise in the classic throwback style – Kingdom Of Decay and The Black Winter being presented as evidence – Defilers Of The Light excels at offering a gigantic dish of headbanging.

It is a fun situation when a band starts their album on a showstopper yet its hard to deny the strength of a song like the titular “Defilers Of The Light” track. It’s a university-level advanced course on how to perform the act of bringing people into an album. After the obligatory scene-setter in “Waves Of Desolation” and its foreboding atmosphere and acoustic guitar, “Defilers Of The Light” lays the groundwork for much of how the album that shares its name is going to go. It is hammering on every button available to it to make the infernal machine move faster, and rarely does the song let up.

It would be tempting to drop into a big, rhythm-heavy riff and slow things down after the intro blasts down a few walls with sheer force, but instead Darkened consistently bend the song around the heavy opening gallop and main guitar lead. It’s the construct from which much of the album pulls its inspiration, and if you find yourself enjoying that one, there’s at least six to seven other songs in a similar vein on Defilers Of The Light. The others are a little more dynamic, such as “On We Slaughter” and its introductory instrumental “Echoes Of Solitude” rumbling in as a humongous, war-drum driven monster, hailed by a choir of guitar-lead. “In Praise Of Shadows” is more in line with the big, elephant-step monsters warned of above, summoned with vocal intonation and emerging from the depths.

Those three modes are how Defilers Of The Light operates. Darkened have taken advantage of their collective of two albums and a few EPs to really forge within metal’s fire a sharpened combination that could have them do battle with any of the warriors currently waving the banner of “old school death metal” and then fusing it with how the world looks at the genre currently. Darkened could just as easily hang with a band like Demonical as they could tackle a more blast-heavy beast in Volturyon.

Many of the gears and pieces that make up the Darkened assemblage are recognizable, sure. Longtime fans of this genre could easily put on gloves, mask, safety goggles, and lab coat and dissect this band piece by piece and know exactly what each organ does. There’s a lot to be said for bands who are expects in the act of execution though, which is where Darkened currently stands. With Defilers of Light they’ve created an expert-level feast of offal on which the listener can dine. Classic where it needs to be, modernized heft and groove when Darkened need to throw their weight around, and distinctly more dynamic than the laser-like focus on resurrection of the previous two albums. Darkened may have seen some lineup shifting between albums but you wouldn’t tell with Defilers Of The Light as it is the strongest iteration on the group’s sound to date.

https://edgedcircleproductions.bandcamp.com/album/defilers-of-the-light
https://www.facebook.com/darkeneddeathmetal

DAGOBA – DIFFERENT BREED

France’s Dagoba have occupied an interesting space in my heavy metal lexicon over the course of their career. Admittedly, I can’t act like I jumped on the train with them from the get-go, instead having had them recommended to me via their 2008 album Face The Colossus by a fellow writer at my previous website.

This happened right around the time of their 2010 album Poseidon, and at the time they managed to strike a near-perfect chord with me: a combination of quite a few of the more popular things threading through metal at the time, with a hefty dose of metalcore replete with clean-sung breaks, groove, the occasional nu-metal bits, and even the occasional dalliance into – at the time – realms more extreme.

Since then, I’ve followed their career and though nothing has quite landed with me with the heft that Poseidon did, I have genereally enjoyed nearly every release they’ve put out. It has of course always helped that they’ve had three incredible drummers behind the kit over the years, and that has always been something of a secret weapon for them. Because if there’s something that can really give a band a shot in the arm for me, it’s having someone that can absolutely annihilate a drumkit. It’s probably been why they’ve come off far heavier than you might expect when you take the band at first blush.

Dagoba have had an interesting career as well, growing to being a fairly large band within the world of France’s heavy metal scene – some of my favorite videos of them have been at what is effectively a hometown show for them, playing Hellfest, and seeing how the crowd reacts – and taking a few shots at larger international stages.

They were picked up by Century Media for a bit and put out some of their heaviest music on the album Black Nova, since it turns out musicians can absolutely write some serious face-stompers when handed the Century Media cudgel and told to beat a listener into submission with it. Dagoba then joined up with Napalm Records for an album and they themselves were hit with the Napalm Records cudgel. Out went the sort of weight-lifter’s heaviness that they’d became known for and in came the synth lines, hook-oriented music, and plenty of blue and purple faux-cyberpunk lighting that has long become the Napalm Records identifier of transformation.

By Night may be the only album of theirs that has whiffed with me, though I do appreciate the sort of crossroads they reached wherein they’ve always kind of been a go-to “pop” band for me, only to eventually evolve into something akin to that direction musically. That didn’t seem to take hold either, as it seems Dagoba are marching forwards on their own once again and with an album title like Different Breed and the image of a minotaur gracing the cover, maybe it could be suggested that the band are seeing a return to heavier musical times?

It needs to be said though that By Night was by no means as mega a sea-change as you might expect by its description. Dagoba always had an album like that in their DNA, just as some of that album’s heaviest moments were almost like bleed-through of the group just being unable to completely get the mosh-warrior syndrome out of their system. However, by comparison, Different Breed is a beastly and much burlier album than before and one far more befitting the gentleman who sits behind the kit for Exocrine beat the hell out of the kit for a while.

Dagoba provide plenty of opportunities as well, with plenty of guitar riffs just shy of completely chug-worthy and braindead to keep the rhythm section of the band consistently hammering away. This is an album of Dagoba trademarks then, equally heavy and a lot less all over the map as previous releases have felt. They singularly focused on heavy for much of Different Breed, and all the mythological creatures they summon and conjure in turn show up to wreck house.

Credit where credit is due too: Outside of the introductory track – which at least is nice enough to have thirty seconds or so of music attached to a baby crying – in “Genes15” and the instrumental “Léthé”, Dagoba play to their strengths. Lineup changes over the years be damned, Dagoba are plenty capable of writing some concrete-cracking worthy music.

The band were even wise enough to notice some of the weightier groovers in the album’s lineup and morphed them into the lead-off singles, so tracks like “Cerberus”, “Minotaur”, “Phoenix Noir”, and “Distant Cry” are all well within the group’s comfort zone of constantly rolling double-bass drum, big guitar riffs, rumbling bass, and the occasional switch off to clean singing for the chorus.

You can hear how Dagoba have had success cracking into the mainstream conciousness at times when they shift into that mode and why they so easily lend themselves to the occasional glossy synth line or ballad-driven song. Different Breed doesn’t pay much of that any heed though; nearly every song here is one gargantuan beast after another – to the point of almost normalizing it.

Proclaiming albums as a return to form is an oft-used trope in music reviewing circles, particularly when a group has had a lengthy career. Dagoba returning to the realm of the stupidly heavy is more than welcome in that same regard. Different Breed punches in a larger weight class than the band have in some times and could stand toe-to-toe with the heavier discs of the early parts of their career.

Yes, even though the album cites itself as being a Different Breed, it’s more in line of being different than those immediately before it. Dagoba are emerging back into a well-trodden path and comfort zone for them, a place that they called home for six or seven albums. Different Breed is the sort of release that comes out of a band that is feeling punchier than they were before, with the sort of urgency to it that it sounds like the group has something to prove again.

It’s pointier and sharper than they’ve been in the past, and those who’ve missed when the band were determined to make their circle pits gigantic or try to reenact movie versions of parting the red sea with a wall of death at Hellfest should be plenty pleased with Different Breed because at the very least this is an album that could blow down a wall if given the chance.

https://linktr.ee/DagobaOfficial
https://www.facebook.com/dagobaofficial/

DELIRIA – PHANTASM

I can never fully escape the clutches of May releases it seems, no matter how damned hard I try. But I wonder, would it still count if I stumbled across such a release in the middle of June while falling down the many vortices of a musical rabbit hole?

Deliria hail from the wider Bay Area, playing a style of atmospheric black metal with heavy post-metal elements that the region has proven to be quite a fertile land for. The area has had a long-running legacy for this style of music and Deliria are the latest vanguards of it, absorbing into their otherworldly carrion creature a handful of different styles, to be divied up and spread out through eight different songs on their sophomore album Phantasm.

Phantasm is an album that had been long in the works before its May 3rd, 2024 release date. Deliria themselves speak on their Bandcamp page for the release of how the recording took place over much of 2020 through 2022, with work continuing afterward. Phantasm‘s release also closes out a close to six and a half year gap between it and the group’s debut album Nausea, and although it charts a different path from that album’s four lengthy songs, Phantasm seems to have been worth the wait.

Deliria are not a traditional dyed-in-the-wool black metal band but one that seems to have been bred for the modern age. Black metal is moreso a weapon in a much wider arsenal than the pure vein that Deliria are defined by. Moments throughout Phantasm are certainly singleminded enough, especially within the chalk lines of songs with more sinister sounding titles like “Spellcraft”, but there’s just as much post-metal and prog-death worming its way through this album, so that it doesn’t seem to fully settle where it has planted its ass at any moment.

Opener “Smoke & Mirrors”, for instance, flies in the face of much of the opening descriptors applied to Deliria‘s latest supplication to the dark and likely will twist a couple heads along the way simply because as much as I’ve pointed out that there are many genres clashing swords on this disc, that song’s opening few moments are still amorphous enough to be maddening – until the vocal work kicks in, and then yes, you do realize that Deliria like their black metal more mysterious and bathed in ash.

“Phantasm” on the other hand is a strong enough song that you can see why it is the title track on the album. It is more narrow-minded and less expansive than its brethren within this release but it also does demonstrate that Deliria have a strong lock on their core sound. After two songs drifting through the artsier side of black metal, the opening conflagration of that song is more welcome. It’s a deft dance between the multitude of influences worming their way throughout Phantasm, but a straightforward knife in the liver like that song can have equal effect to a more complicated musical Rube Goldberg machine of death.

Deliria chart some interesting cliff walls to climb as well for the following three songs, as there’re multiple passages throughout “Attic”, “Reckless”, and “Covenant” that could equal some of Opeth‘s more dungeon-dwelling death metal segments. It’s a strange spectre to summon but with the few guitar solos and how they are sustained, as well as the main melody bent around “Reckless”, you can’t help but hear it.

Deliria are doing their best play at dynamics by throwing ceaseless curveballs in the middle segments of this release. Especially since so much of it lays the foundation for a rollicking-adventure like “Oblivion”, which does the “In summation….” act of Phantasm as a whole. Fans of longer journeys in their black metal tracks will doubtlessly be drawn into the arms of “Oblivion” even before checking out the rest of this album.

It’s fair to say that I recognize a lot of what is going on within Phantasm. The building blocks that make up this album are known, and even though Deliria put in a commendable amount of footwork to at least deliver them from odd-angles, corners, and windows unseen, you’ll still know the location of the musical vein that Deliria have tapped for Phantasm long before the release ends.

Taking the “there’s nothing new under the sun” approach and watching the band flip it over onto its head and at least contort it into uncanny-valley levels of familiar is part of the joy in listening to Phantasm. That’s partially why I snapped this disc into the musical maw for this website, since I could tell from the start that Phantasm is likely to hold a tremendous amount of appeal for people – especially if you’re familiar at all with much of the black metal emerging from the asphalt crater of the Bay Area. It is a healthy hybrid of black metal, post, prog, dissonance, and a few other sprinklings likely to show that Deliria comprises a crew with a wide swath of musical influences.

Credit to them as it stands though: Phantasm must’ve taken a hell of a lot of work because Deliria meld all of those influences together into a release as enjoyable as it is rabid and snarling.

https://deliriaofficial.bandcamp.com/album/phantasm
https://www.facebook.com/DeliriaBandOfficial

DARK TRANQUILLITY – ENDTIME SIGNALS

One of the more consistent things I’ve found over the years is that when it comes to Dark Tranquillity albums and new releases, one of the predominant factors that everything circles back around to is, “Well, how did you feel about the last one?”. Asking yourself this multiple times over the course of a band’s career starts to feel strangely redundant, as if falling into a fractal hellmouth constructed of circles upon circles.

When you’re consistently asking yourself ‘how did you feel about the last one” as a factor in thinking about a new one, the stack of “how did you feel…” becomes almost generational. You could say it’s been a sign of an almost incredible consistency from Dark Tranquillity over the years, but when it comes to their sound, you could also say Dark Tranquillity are also incredibly fucking stubborn. They settled on an artwork aesthetic and song style years ago and goddamnit they’re going to make that the Dark Tranquillity signature sound one way or another.

You could say Dark Tranquillity have been of two minds about their sound for some time now. They’re the ones of the early vanguard that helped popularize “melodeath” as a genre proper that can’t quite be so easily whittled down. In Flames were clear about their desire – early on after their first couple of fiery releases – to have the Maiden-esque lead-guitar work and ultra-bouncy guitar riffs behind it, a combination almost tailor-made to catch people’s ear by virtue of being irresistibly catchy even as some of the more folk or swaying guitar melodies got left in the dust. Soilwork were the reliably modern crew, every-present with the current trends and huge for a big chorus.

And then you had Dark Tranquillity, whose sound over time had evolved into an odd mash of melodeath, synth work, prog-metal, and even the occasional goth-shoegaze-esque passage working its way into their songs. While it seemed like others were going for the faster “one-two” drum beating, Dark Tranquillity got more emotionally heavy, moodier, and more atmospheric with releases like Projector and Haven. They started to bare their teeth again in the Damage Done through Fiction run. Every release after that has danced between those two eras of their career, but it has always seemed like the band are slowly clawing their way back into the slower and more introspective work that preceded an album like Damage Done.

So in a way, how you feel about Endtime Signals is going to relate to how you felt about Moment. How you felt about Moment is going to tie into where you stood on Atoma, and the opinion of Atoma will likely grow from seeds that were planted during the group’s Construct release.

Dark Tranquillity have been iterating on this particular sound for some time, having scorched a lot of ground with the wildly all over the place We Are The Void. It’s been the story of their decade-plus career now. Dark Tranquillity‘s lineup may have changed – even seismically given shifting guitarist roles – but that constant need for the band to keep pounding away at the moodier keyboard atmospherics and prog-metal-minded approach to their music is like a demon ever-perched on the band’s shoulder that refuses to leave.

If, like me, you thought that Moment was surprising and was better than it had any right to be at times, then Endtime Signals benefits from picking up where that left off and having a slight bit more stability in the lineup. It’s certainly one of Mikael Stanne‘s more varied vocal performances in some time, as his talent and time are being spread out among three other projects in The Halo Effect, Grand Cadaver, and now Cemetery Skyline, allowing for all sorts of ideas that would normally find themselves being crammed into a Dark Tranquillity disc as their one shot at glory to breathe a little and fit exactly where a song might ask him to travel. Dark Tranquillity has become the three separate approaches, unified.

Despite all the talk of Dark Tranquillity‘s aspirations to something more progressive and artistically minded, Endtime Signals does play conservatively in how it approaches its musical sequence with many of the album’s quicker songs – and most of the singles – laying in the front half of the release, whereas the slower and more-singing-heavy and experimental approaches are positioned in the back half, the area wherein Dark Tranquillity continue to proclaim they are not just musicians but also artistes.

Much like Soilwork in recent years, Dark Tranquillity are surprisingly giving as well, with the deluxe edition of Endtime Signals offering around fourteen songs – which is a lot of time to spend with anyone, even an introspective and occasional fleeting-beauty creator like Dark Tranquillity. This makes for a great addition to the grand musical shuffle pile where you can take an artist’s entire discography and let all their material run wild, yet Endtime Signals on its own in deluxe form does run a little long. The album starts full of vitality and with the same sort of creativity that ran through albums like Construct and Atoma where Dark Tranquillity were taking their insisted-upon signature sound and bending it into new forms, yet settles into a groove not too dissimilar from Moment, just more confident sounding than before.

The fun exercise to perform with Endtime Signals then is how much of the album you would enjoy seeing live. Given my own personal experiences with seeing Dark Tranquillity – i.e., never – we’ve seriously been two ships passing in the night for the better part of twenty years of fandom, and I fucking saw At The Gates before them – I’d be thrilled with a good amount of Endtime Signals. The run from “Shivers And Voids” up until “Drowned Out Voices” is surprisingly strong, safe as Dark Tranquillity may be playing it with those five, but “Our Disconnect” and “A Bleaker Sun” on the slower and more keyboard-heavy side – that Dark Tranquillity pendulum swinging to the other end as it were – would also be fun breathers in a live setting. “The Last Imagination” picking things up tempo-wise after the first real big breather of Endtime Signals is also a solid song.

In a way, Endtime Signals seems to be the unifier of the albums in the current Dark Tranquillity musical era, their stubborn insistence on this particular style finally having become the way the band are defined. Given the aforementioned “surprisingly hard to pin down” aspect of their sound, you’d almost wonder if there’s a sort of determined workhorse quality to the band as well that has allowed them to stick around as long as they have. Many other bands aren’t as able to exist above sheer one-dimensional definition for the modern-day instant-gratification crowd and maintain a career.

Endtime Signals then is interesting because it is the most imaginably Dark Tranquillity sounding album in this style out there. Much like its predecessor – and the album before that…and before that…and you can see where this might be leading – there are moments of sheer awe and gorgeousness still packed into the release. When Dark Tranquillity bare their fangs for a quicker song, the need to headbang still grips on a subconscious level and there are a handful of legitimate killer guitar segments that are going to worm their way into your head within the Endtime Signals tracklisting.

It’s pleasantly surprising in that way, because you’d often expect a band like Dark Tranquillity to have long settled into putting out releases that are generally “good” but really feel like an excuse to get out on the road and break out the hits again. Dark Tranquillity don’t do that here and haven’t yet, so you still somewhat get the enjoyment of wondering whether you may be disappointed by a release when it comes to them – only to have the thrill of “this is way better than I was expecting” to set in instead. Dark Tranquillity‘s career is a three-decade long run now that still manages to surprise in such a way every once in a while and Endtime Signals is an album that does just that.

https://centurymedia.bandcamp.com/album/endtime-signals
https://www.facebook.com/dtofficial