Dissection - Storm of the Light's Bane
Review: This album invokes melodic rock-based metal band Iron Maiden as its overwhelming aesthetic ancestor while its skeleton retains a complex evolution of architectural pieces of an idea, the philosophical style developed by death metal bands as the format of their artistic expression. This fusion creates music of rare beauty with embedded elements of the sophisticated emotion of black metal.
Harmonizing guitars serve melodic patterns over linear percussion and almost integrate the overwhelming tendency of rhythm when the pattern shifts and disintegrates into metamorphosing rhythmic signals, a new deconstruction of idea. Lead guitars tear through the silken patterns of melody, curling notes like mutant worms self-consuming and virulent, beautiful in the reverberating balance of aggression they portray. All of these patterns combine in simple songs that reveal building ideas in their patterning changes, increasingly intensity to one or more moments of intensely composed and darkly eloquent music.
Brainwave tendencies of sloping melodies move like rock n roll and this music repeats too often the idiosyncrasies of that genre, yet the vocals carry rasping not toneless melodies disembodied through the waves of music, richly harmonic and subversively rhythmic in an exacting evil dissonance rather than the sleazy nihilistic apathy of rockstar gluttony. Melodramatic, melancholic, dark music emanates emotional beauty with sad interlocking melodies speaking an essence of epic mental sensation through fantasy, metaphoric gateway to the artistic content inspired by this release in the listener.
What first seems happy sad rock music turns poignantly evil as it inverts and enunciates a recursing serpentine despair in virulent and corrupted voices as if through the distorted transmission of a sick comic radio script reporting the apocalypse. Unlike most of black metal however, this is not ideological music; there is no "save the world" or "destroy the world" mentality here. The first Dissection album may be a clearer vision of this band, but this release is sleeker with a more warlike dedication to functionality within art. As if brushed steel this is malevolent but musical metal, created by the masters of several styles.