Dark Tranquillity — Skydancer (1993)

For the record, that is how they spell the band name, with two L’s.

“Nightfall” sure is an opener.

If you want to know what the basic feel of Skydancer is, its opening track “Nightfall” starts at a black metal tempo and within 19 seconds there’s a quick break before a new riff is introduced in the same tempo at a different key, and then they modulate the key of that riff as well. At 34 seconds in, the blast beats of the drums become even more intense as the guitars shift keys once again. At 43 seconds that happens again. The song is nearly 5 minutes long and just keeps going in this fashion.

For listeners of contemporary tech death this may be a typical thing, but even in MDM where prog-inspired shifts like this do occur, this is incredibly frenetic. The riffs themselves are all distinct, technical (for the era, don’t expect Inferi) melodic thrash and death metal riffs, but it requires a lot of attention to keep track of. What vision does this chaotic song structure serve? I decided to take a look at the lyrics and see if maybe the changes in riffs were meant to accompany changes in perspective or tone that would make sense in a Concept Album sort of way. Instead I got the opposite impression: while the lyrics are indeed quite conceptual, there’s a consistent perspective and tone. Here’s the end of “Nightfall”

Nightfall by the shore of time,

a tidal wave of fire and woe

Swept away with the last of life

the core of the enigma as bestowed

Our crystal spirits melt to flow

the mountainside along

To join as one with seas of old

in symbiotic songs:

“Communion… Within the Oversoul

of the Universe”

We are but fragment of Eternity,

pale shadows of what we’ll once be

In life’s outer regions I will find

the foremost Tranquility

Chanting the odes of Magonia

A soulstream in flight to the Otherworld

…to the Otherworld

“Nightfall (by the Shores of Time)” seems to indicate the end of existence on a cosmic scale. What I’ve concluded instead is that this songwriting idea of throwing out so many “big” ideas (more on that in a second) in such a relatively short amount of time while matching that to a heady lyrical concept is meant to indicate a prog sense of scale, even though this song in particular is only about 5 minutes long. This is achieved by playing almost everything at a breakneck speed. The song is dizzying. Even if we were to compare this to say, Archspire, Archspire will hang out in a certain melodic/harmonic space for a significantly longer period of time before making a switch. (As well, if this is the sort of thing that would irk you, Skydancer is not nearly that technical.) I’m not making an original observation here but it’s unavoidable. In fact I came into the record knowing this reputation and wanting to see if it lived up to that “hype.” It most certainly does.

“Nightfall” is such an intense opener that the band spends the next 13 minutes on “Crimson Winds” and “A Bolt of Blazing Gold” recovering, or at least letting the audience recover.

“Crimson Winds” opens with a distinctly My Dying Bride counterpoint guitar section before slowly picking up pace and intensity into an almost Helloween or Dragonforce intense speed section and then collapsing back into the MDB riff, before building back up and then branching off.

“A Bolt of Blazing Gold” is when you realize that “epic” really was the idea here as we’re already getting the 7-minute half-ballad that opens with acoustic guitars. “Blazing Gold” is also when we’re introduced to the lovely voice of Anna-Kaisa Avehall who brings some real clean singing into the mix, her relatively higher register bringing a point of light into the crushing midpace of that portion of the song, before taking over to lead a folk verse along with another clean guest vocalist, Stefan Lindgren, who sounds remarkably like rhythm guitarist Mikael Staane would sound as a clean singer in later years. It’s almost unfortunate that this song splits times between clean and dirty sounds as the acoustic guitars sound utterly gorgeous whereas the distorted guitars seem a bit distant. “Blazing Gold” also features the lyric from which the album’s title is derived:

A bolt of blazing gold,

a sunfire in zenith hurled

Oh, wingless skydancer,

rejoiced upon the warmth unfurled

What wonders do you hold ensnared

with your mighty heart?

What secrets may be mine

to brother-share as we depart?

I would summarize the lyrics on Skydancer, written mostly by guitarist Niklas Sundin with contributions from Mikael Staane, as largely being about looking at the sky and feeling bummed out, described in a bare minimum of at least 50 distinct words. There’s something “deeper” here, but I’m either not perceptive enough to find it or it isn’t there. But on the positive side, the purple nature of the lyrics means that at least a few stanzas such as that “skydancer” verse do at least look nice on paper. This is genuinely a compliment, and not one that most metal bands would get from me.

Definitely a highlight on this record is track 4, “In Tears Bereaved.” Maybe the only track on the record that could qualify as a single, the almost-4-minute track is still crammed full of dizzying tempo and key shifts, (the tempo changes three times in the opening 13 seconds) but it has what I think is the best riff on the record, which is repeated and variated upon in fun ways. It’s a blazing tremolo picked riff that outlines a quick chord progression with an inspired turnaround. After establishing and developing from that idea, the band breaks into a doomier middle section before returning to the original hook to vary upon it further. “Tears Bereaved” would have made a great opener.

“Skywards” opens with a similarly classic-sounding hook before going in its own thousand directions. It’s another track on this album, but one thing it makes exceptionally clear is the value of then-bassist Martin Henriksson. He’s recorded and mixed exceptionally well on this record compared to the fate suffered by the bassists of In Flames and At the Gates up til this point, but more importantly than that, he plays his ass off on this entire record, especially tearing it up on “Skywards” where the bass becomes the center of the harmony as the guitars reach into their upper register.

Henriksson was a very fine bassist here and on The Gallery but he also helped write most of the songs on this album and would later move to guitar while remaining a great songwriter. Guitarists Sundin and Staane have strong interplay throughout, but their recorded tone is suspect, and poor Anders Jivarp sounds as though his work was replaced entirely with triggers. Once again, like At the Gates’ first record, everything is drenched in reverb and that’s really stealing from the impact of instruments while also making everything sound way too “big”, especially the drum samples. Perhaps the most interesting sound on the record is future In Flames vocalist Anders Friden, whose voice is perhaps so buried in the mix that he simply doesn’t sound that harsh at all? Weirdly enough, his voice is the most “soothing” part of the record. Not sure how to describe it, but the primary thing is he definitely doesn’t sound like himself, though then again Anders Friden sounds a little different on every record he does. All that said, for Dark Tranquillity there is no comparison: Mikael Staane would do his take of “Alone” on a later EP and would sound significantly better than Friden’s original.

Henriksson also lays down really tasty basswork throughout “Through Ebony Archways”, the second track to feature the clean vocalists from track three, as well as more acoustic guitar work. “Ebony Archways” is similar to the other half-acoustic track, “Blazing Gold”, but it is significantly shorter and admittedly feels much tighter and more convincing. While both make interesting developments into heavy guitar work, DT is convincing enough at this neo-folk sound that I sorta wish the album had featured a full acoustic track front to back. As it stands, this track was most of the way there and is one of the album’s better tracks.

“Shadow Duet” is too long and has a dearth of compelling riffs. The thing about melodic death metal is you live by the sword and you die by the sword, and “the sword” is basic triadic harmony in the minor scale. It’s really simple: Either your shit slaps or it doesn’t. “Shadow Duet” is 7 minutes of shit that does not slap.

“My Faeryland Forgotten” in contrast, is 4:38 of some of the nicest stuff on the record. While retaining the almost bright sense of melody that pervades the record, “Faeryland” features some deep low guitar chords and really tight, aggressive riffing that feels mean instead of messy, building to mid-track prog wanderings, leading the listener to believe an extended outro is on its way, but instead the band downshifts and slams on the gas to end on perhaps the most ferocious riffs on the record. This song ripped.

“Alone” then comes in as the ending track with a deep, doomy riff in the same key as we ended the previous track on (I love continuity in this style) before transitioning to a gorgeous, slow unison harmony section between the two guitars and the bass that’s genuinely quite gorgeous, and that the band develops convincingly. It’s a good closer to bring this pseudo-epic to its appropriate tragic ending as Anders Friden croaks:

Once I held in my hand the starlight of Eden

and the white sky lay open in a soul that was free

(But the years flew so fast as the shadows were cast

and I woke up one morning with no reason to be)

I’m all alone in the shade of the nameless

Sorrow

I’m all alone within a shadow fire of fear

Take me home to whence I came

Where I’ll find light to feed my flame of life

Or my heart will die without a whisper of hope…

If this was the only record Dark Tranquillity ever made, it would probably be a cult classic, or at the bare minimum I’d be on it like one. I get the feeling if I’d heard this when I was 18-ish I’d’ve been incredibly into it. But it’s impossible to avoid the idea that this is a record whose more blistering tracks seem stuffed with big ideas that are merely “strung together.” It’s seemingly the same issue that plagues The Red In The Sky Is Ours, just on a record with catchier riffs. In fact, repeated listens find that this is not the case, that the band is often developing upon their ideas. But in a record where the songs trend towards long, some of these tracks are simply exhausting.

Conclusion: Skydancer is the first album released I think that really taps into the artistic direction that melodic death metal was headed as a genre. It’s a record that seeks beauty over destruction, and that I think is what really sets MDM apart. And while the genre is called “Melodic Death Metal”, what it really is on the whole is a combination of the influences of death, power, thrash, black metal, and a tinge of folk. All of that is also on display here. It’s also completely bonkers, totally exhausting, and really not at all coherent. While highly recommended as a dizzying and surprising experience, Dark Tranquillity would grow as a band to make cohesive efforts more compelling than what they made here.