After taking most of 2018 off, Swedish melancholic metal stars Katatonia returned to work last year, and the results of those efforts are here in the band’s eleventh offering, City Burials. True to form, the quintet delivers a set of emotional, glistening dark prog, but this time around with a few classic heavy metal embellishments.
As we have come to expect, the subject matter of City Burials is somewhat gloomy. Songs of course deal primarily with sadness, emotional fragility, and the idea that memories are actually losses, or buried moments of the past. Co-founder and singer Jonas Renske delivers these lyrics with the emotional heft that is his trademark, his deep voice reverberating with a mix of yearning and wistfulness.
Despite the songs on City Burials being written almost completely by Renske, Katatonia sound like a vital and invigorated band. The two newest members – Daniel Moilanen on drums and Roger Ojersson on guitar – bring an energy that belies the band’s introspective nature. Moilanen played on 2016’s The Fall of Hearts, and Ojersson contributed some solos on it, but they’ve each had a few years to develop additional chemistry. Moilanen is capable of a subtlety not often found in drummers, and Ojersson brings energetic chops to the table that are welcome additions to the songs.
“Heart Set to Divide” is a majestic opener, pure Katatonia, larger than life and apocalyptic in nature. It sets the tone for the album, awash in keyboards and airy vocals for nearly two minutes, until the band enters with progressive metal riffing. The song subtly drifts in and out, with plenty of soft and heavy dynamics, and we are immediately drawn into the album.
It is quickly followed by “Behind the Blood,” a surprisingly up-tempo rocker featuring classic riffs and lead breaks. It may not immediately have that Katatonia vibe, but it works, and effectively showcases the band’s love of the metal music they all grew up with. Elsewhere, “Rein” and “Flicker” feature moments of more traditional metal mixed in among the gloom.
With eleven songs clocking in around 50 minutes, no song overstays its welcome, which makes City Burials even more impactful. In less talented hands, a song like “Lacquer” could lose its audience, but Katatonia keep it under five minutes, and the somber, melancholic dirge is enthralling rather than boring.
When many bands see a slump in the middle of their albums, not so here. The middle trio of “The Winter of Our Passing,” “Vanishers,” and “City Glaciers” is an enthralling set. The first is a hypnotic and airy rhythmic number that gains momentum as it progresses. “Vanishers” is exquisite, a duet with Anni Bernard (Full of Keys) that grabs the heart and doesn’t let go, while “City Glaciers” is a layered and textured exercise in ringing guitars, cascading toms, a classic Katatonia example of the ebb and flow of mood and emotion.
City Burials is one of the best-sounding self-produced albums in recent memory, practically glistening with lush keys and vocals, guitars that move from wistful to metallic, drums that can either crush or augment depending on the moment, and through it all a deep, reverberating bass presence that adds ominous undertones.
A year off did Katatonia a world of good. While both Dead End Kings and The Fall of Hearts were strong albums, they had weak moments. Not so on City Burials. This is an album of beautifully dark progressive rock that will keep listeners glued to their speakers start to finish, and certainly one of the best albums of the month.
(released April 24, 2020 on Peaceville Records)
I certainly am looking forward to getting Katatonia’s new album. They are simply brilliant – with musical skills that are incomparable, Jonas Renske’s world weary and plaintive breathy vocals, and the band delivering exactly what each song calls for, be it some slamming guitar work or a smoky trippy and melancholy keyboard passage that shows metal bands are certainly no strangers to real melody and hooks, although many people who used to claim to “love” metal and declare that none of it is good would give the time of day to Katatonia or some of these “modern” bands who definitely make liars out of people who think there was nothing worthy after “Appetite For Destruction” or maybe “The Black Album”. This short list is aimed at those types whose tastes are in a blob of amber that will not allow them to listen to anything much past their high school graduations.
Porcupine Tree Not quite metal, but very popular with the progressive metal crowd. You like Pink Floyd or Alan Parsons and you don’t want to hear Steve Wilson’s best band that would have easily been gigantic had he been twenty or so years older.
Opeth Same thing basically. Nobody in the Jurassic crowd will listen to anything where a death metal vocal may ever have taken place, but even after Mikael Akerfeldt went with clean vocals, and why not, considering he has a gorgeous voice that really doesn’t need the help of a grunt.
Ghost Okay, you say they aren’t metal. I’m 59, and you will just have to believe me as someone who was there listening to heavy rock in the ’70’s when I tell you they would have been absolutely gigantic but maybe would have had to tone down the Satan schtick a bit because that approach was still pretty frightening, enough for people to really raise “Hell”, pun intended, when one considers that desensitizing of the world through movies, videos, gaming and heavy music hadn’t really got started yet, and was still underground.
Mastodon I dearly love Rush. I can’t think of anybody who has ever really sounded like them, unless you count the first two albums that admittedly borrowed from the heavy bands like Zeppelin a bit, but even then going their own way. But Mastodon is in that heavy/mythological headspace. Heavier overall, but I don’t think lots of prog bands or heavies like Mastodon could not have been hugely influenced by Rush, and have released superb albums throughout their career. “The Hunter” especially would have been another blockbuster had it been released somewhere around Rush’s “2112” or “Hemispheres” for their proggiest album. You love Rush, you ought to at least listen to “The Hunter”, as Mastodon are superior songwriters, and they don’t make riffs old style any heavier than “Curl Of The Burl”.
Clutch Why aren’t they as huge as any true honest to whomever heavy ass rock and roll band that ever existed? Again, wimps who could make that happen won’t turn off their fucking “Boston” or Aerosmith’s “Toys In The Attic” to listen. There is NO EXCUSE for these time warped fossils to not at least listen to Clutch. It has everything you could possibly want in a great rock and roll album by any great band – Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, the aforementioned Aerosmith (’70’s only-after “Done With Mirrors” they sucked, BTO, Boston, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Rush, you get the idea. For baby boomers who used to really deride their “square” parents and wouldn’t even listen to the Beach Boys after Monterrey, they became more fossilized than their parents, whom at least listened to music from two or three decades, and some of it was damned good, whether hippies and now Jurassic rocks admit it or not. You think “Crazy Train” played at a football game is heavy and fresh, you are a miserable phony. Go home and play your Englebert Humperdinck albums your older sister had like mine did.