Dismember‘s Like an Ever Flowing Stream turned twenty-five this weekend. Like an Ever Flowing Stream upped the intensity from Carnage‘s Dark Recollections in the same way that Legion would do from Deicide‘s debut. Like an Ever Flowing Stream was faster, heavier, and more distorted. Dismember drenched themselves in blood and plugged dimed Boss Heavy Metal 2 pedals into dimed Marshall JCM 900 stacks, generating a ridiculously fat, high-gain rhythm guitar tone to trample and mangle all others.
The twin, panned and syncopated rhythm guitars thundered down from the skt like live wires thrashing through the air. The riffing resembled a night terror of Sepultura‘s speed metal manifested into material reality. Dissonant tension was resolved through Nicke Andersson‘s tortured heavy metal leads of lucid consonance only to be rended back apart by the next cyclical verse or song. Three columnar compositions held Dismember’s grinding, cosmic cycle of dying heavens and living hells from the earth. These entranced listeners, letting them revel in the bloody carnage before blasting them into chaos again.
Barely thirty minutes long, Like an Ever Flowing Stream was a record arranged to be endlessly replayed. Rising from death’s sleep a quarter-century later, one still feels eerily compelled to lift the needle from the locked groove, flip the LP over, and enwind into the arms of cool-enfolding death again.
Tags: 1991, anniversary, carnage, death metal, Dismember, Like an Ever Flowing Stream, Nicke Andersson, Sweden
The best album to come out of the Stockholm scene.
Ah deathmetal.org…this is why I can’t quite abandon you. Keep the spirit of true death metal alive by continuously revering its classic (and even its not so classic but pure) manifestations. This album is one of death metal’s great achievements, and it will endure for as long as there are those who apprehend its essence, and perhaps even beyond.
This and Dark Recollections were the only of the “big” Swedish releases that have stuck with me over the years. The first three from Therion, first one from At the Gates, first two from Unleashed, and all the Merciless albums live on however.
I hardly hear about those THERION albums anymore. Still under the radar? Or have people just forgotten how good the used to be. I show them to every person I know who even slightly likes heavy music and most of the time they are instant converts.
LIKE AN EVERFLOWING STREAM…certainly kicks the shit out of, I dunno, everything, from a sheer intensity standpoint. LEGION comparison is apt.
Therion switched audiences. They shipped a terrible album in 1996, and then went into epic symphonic power metal (ESPM). They do a good job of that, but I can only listen to it once in a blue moon. The glitch is that because their new audience does not want death metal, the band has incentive not only not to promote those older albums, but to sweep them under the rug. Same with the fans. They thus lost their existing audience for their death metal work, and newer people will never think to look to Therion for death metal.
Yes I think Dark Reflections, this LP and Velvet Creation are what I still keep returning to spin from the Swedish ‘melodic’ era. Unless one admits At The gates’ first LP and EP as part of this melodic era?
Everythings fine and dandy, but the article reads like run-of-the-mill metal magazine trite.
Hmm … I missed this when it was new because my involvement with anything-metal ended apruptly in 1991 for reasons I’m not going to detail here (my last conscious memories are roughly ‘Left Hand Path’ which I liked at that time although I haven’t listened to it since, ‘Dough-boys from Hell’ [sound of someone vomiting into far end of a
200m pipe] and a review of ‘Eaten Back to Life’ I didn’t read because the album title & cover looked too silly) but so far, I didn’t find anything particularly special in this. It’s surely stylistically distinctive because there’s a huge heavy metal influence in the solos and sometimes in the riffs (eg, towards the end of the 5th track) and in some ‘beautiful’ melodies but I’ve never liked heavy metal (minus “Love is like dragging your balls acrossed barbed wire”, http://tinyurl.com/habqsy6), specifically because of ‘the melodies’. There’s an interesting tempo change in the 3rd track which adds some suspense. There’s a huge Slayer influence in the vocals (for want of a better term, I’d call that “the aggressively shouting style”), also something I generally dislike. All in all (This is not a balanced opinion. I’d need to listen to this for 4 – 5 days in a row in order to form one), I’d take https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6LbSSEUWgI in favor of this any time because it’s entirely unsublime instead of superficially metaphysical, if in doubt noisy and not conventionally beautiful and also because the drumming seems a lot more it’s own voice, be it a primitive one, than something that’s also there (I also don’t like digging up carcasses — I’ve done that a lot in the last two decades. They just remain dead, no matter what they once were or could have become).
Awesome album. The closest this band ever got to a transcendental effort.
At the end of the 2015 Grave album (‘Out of Respect for the Dead’), there’s a 9-minute-and-something track called ‘Grotesque Glory’ (AFAIK not available on the internet) telling the story of an undead king who raises from the dead among all his former comrades-in-arms and friends every sunset in order to fight his last and most glorious battle again through all of the night until he alone is still alive but dying among the slain on the battlefield as the sun rises. To be repeated during the next night and the next and the next until the end of time. This can – of course – be dismissed as pointless fantasy story from a band which just isn’t ambitious enough (I pilfered that from the review, sorry if I misunderstood that). It’s also open to broader interpretation to anyone who thinks it means
something to him. The music goes very nicely with the text.
“As a result, this music has in itself an elusive passage of transcendence in which it is forever from the mud reaching toward the stars.” — DMU archives
Given five lifetimes I doubt I could come up with a better description of this album.
One of the finest examples of Swedish death metal along with Dark Recollections and left hand path. Like an everflowing stream will never age.