EXHUMATION — Dance Across the Past (1998)

For the first time since I’ve been doing mostly largely chronological history of melodic death metal, I’m cheating. I have to. Ever since finishing my review of Exhumation’s awesome 1997 debut album Seas of Eternal Silence, a record I confidently called the best “forgotten” record since I’d started the project, I couldn’t help myself but to sample their next record, and since then my ears have been absolutely fixated on their follow up, 1998’s Dance Across The Past.

Folks, this one is even better. I don’t know what else to tell you, Dance Across The Past is no mere hidden gem, it is an unqualified masterpiece, the sort of record that I hope by the time I am no longer alive is much more popular and held in much higher regard than where it is today, lacking as it does in any professionally written reviews that I can find, even after a recent limited edition vinyl reissue. This record must be heard.

Probably the best record I’ve listened to for this project has been either In Flames’ Jester Race or the as-yet-unreviewed Whoracle (I drafted that review quite a while ago, actually,) and that’s because those records have absolutely everything: they have the unique and distinguishing production, they have the songs, the playing, and a factor that can really put a great record over the top for me: the lyrics. I felt (at least when I reviewed it, I feel like I need to revisit it,) that the lyrics on Seas of Eternal Silence were unremarkable, and therefore kept it on a level just below the best records by the Gothenburg Three which all have some degree of lyrical vision. That was the only thing holding it back, and it was otherwise on all levels a truly great record.

To put it simply, Dance Across The Past improves the lyricism while also being arguably a better produced and better composed record. Seas of Eternal Silence had a tiny bit of a pattern of having a slightly lesser track be followed by a greater track, and I think that’s also totally absent here. Every single track on this record is just as killer as the last, filled with the frenetic energy of Schuldiner-esque compositional structure, incredibly powerful riffs, inspiring lead melodies, and just an overall preponderance of “wow” moments. It is a complete record.

Production Notes

Of particular note is the production. I don’t really know how else to say this: the mix isn’t as clean, but Dance Across The Past is, as far as my ears can tell, the first true iteration of the Clayman sound as it originated from Studio Fredman: C standard guitars sent through mid-pushing tube screamers into mid-focused Peavy 5150 amps, paired with a healthy post-production reverb that gives the sound space without giving it the overbearing cavernous emptiness of some 80’s metal productions. The vocals are a tiny bit too loud, and the bass and guitars are mixing a bit too much, not to mention that the playing on Dance Across The Past is by design a bit nastier than the ultra tight playing of Clayman, but the basic idea of the sound is completely visible here. It’s no doubt that Jesper Stromblad (who played a guest lead on the opening track) and Fredrik Nordstrom heard what they put together on this record and decided instantly that this would be the sound of the next In Flames record, the all-time masterpieces Colony and Clayman, as it would also be for Exhumation’s follow-up Traumaticon and then Marios’ next band Nightrage’s debut album, Sweet Vengeance. When I first heard Sweet Vengeance, I thought that Marios was trying to clone the Clayman sound. I was an idiot. He helped invent the Clayman sound, and if you listen to Nightrage’s newest record Abyss Rising you can still hear that same production style, Studio Fredman or not.

Big Moments

I think the “wow” moments are why I’ve become so enthusiastic to declare this a record that must be heard. The first time you heard “Holy Wars” and heard that tight chugging groove matched with the syncopating drums, that’s a “wow” moment. The big jumpdafuckup breakdown riff in “The Jester Race,” that’s a “wow” moment. “Master of Puppets” is just one big moment after another. This is not particularly deep analysis I realize but I do think it’s fair to say that a lot of times on the most beloved records, there are individual moments that seem to transcend and leave a distinct impact on the listener. Song after song on this record the first time I heard it had be simply in awe. Every song has at least one of these moments, and I’ve settled that I should simply list them all out.

“Images of Our Extinction” opens with some 30 seconds of clean guitars and keyboard atmospheres before the band takes a highly unusual tact for a record of this variety: they actually open with the doomiest, slowest passage on the record, going for heaviness via the impact of each massive power chord rather than immediately resorting to furious death metal riffage. This ends up becoming a favorite trope for the band throughout the album. The result is a subversion of expectations for a record like this where the first big heavy moment results in powerful slow motion headbanging as the record brings you in. From here bassist/vocalist John Nokteridis continues delivering the same pained, bellowing death metal vocalization that he provided so expertly on the last record, but his lyricism dispenses with the more abstracted imagery of the debut record and decides to simply lay it on thick with depressive european metal imagery that, at least via the force of his vocalization, completely lands as dark and epic rather than “cringe” as the kids would say. He bellows:

I climbed the stairs of loneliness
from where I saw a darker sky
of images torn under fire
and debris of the human race

I realized the pain on earth
the bitterness of our existence

I forced myself to see some more
fronted the horror
of our inevitable extinction

Right after that punctuative “extinction” the band hits the first really big “wow” riff of the record with a massive chord figure layered below a very Metal melodic figure that leans on some really nasty, kinda evil notes before settling on the more typical notes, the mixture making for something that leaves you with some real nice stink face before following the riff through. Nokteridis returns to the mic with yet more bitterness:

Mediocre beings
without strong passions
left in the mercy of altruistic
fantasies
refusing responsibility
for shaping our destinies

And this cuts to yet another huge riff, this time layered with the classically menacing sounds of a church organ (provided by producer Fredrik Nordstrom,) milking out the last of the menacing energy of this particular section before a sudden and very compelling cut from this ultra low note death metal power balladry into a more uptempo 6/8 section that eventually leads us to the first of the record’s more typical (but still of course very compelling) moments of Gothenburg harmonized lead. From here the track goes in a few different directions in quick succession, all of which seemed well placed and cleverly structured as to make each dynamic shift in this case feel more like a powerful and shocking transition that renewed the energy of the track rather than robbing its momentum, including into another 6/8 harmonized lead in a completely different key before returning to the original balladic tempo, and then that truly impressive chord and lead combo with its insistence upon your slow motion headbanging, a request I find difficult to deny.

The overall energy of the record then increases a fair amount on “Withered Sky” which opens with this fantastic combination of chugging thrash tempo guitars, lead notes layered on top, but then those lead harmonies being replaced by clean guitars processed with something like a sitar effect making for a totally unique atmosphere, really fitting in with the astral synthesizer intros of both the opener and then the upcoming title track. The track settles into a more midtempo shuffle as Nokteridis hits us again:

Do you see
in me all the endless years
that ‘ve marked my life and my destiny

See the time
is flying leaving on my soul
all the signs
of my world which is dying
and I am falling apart
in a vicious cycle

And once again in a clever arrangement of lyrics to match music, the ending of that particular group of phases leads into a thrashing tempo even faster and more aggressive than the way the track opened. That highly aggressive verse then reverts back to the tempo that the track opened at where at 1:09 we get yet another fantastic MDM chord and lead section with just really fantastic matching of rhythm, chord choice, and lead note overlays. This sort of arrangement gives you one of MDM’s best features which is the ability to reinforce the rhythm and chord changes of your riffs by overlaying the strong melodic notes that are usually missing from the basic root-fifth power chord, allowing for a richer sense of harmony and also an increased “weight” to your grooves as it were.

That section breaks back into a shuffling verse as it was before with yet another great verse from Nokteridis:

Do you feel
my soul fading away
as the time is leaving
through my hands
gray clouds are hiding the stars
that’s guiding my nights
in an exile land
trapped in a withered sky

While I’m not necessarily seeing the same level of lyrical conceptuality, narrative, or even really specificity of imagery that I expect from this genre’s best (read: Anders Friden), the big thing that I think Exhumation is achieving here is much like a group like say, Iron Maiden who never dropped all that much wisdom lyrically, is that they’re finding the right combination of subject matter, imagery, and feeling that matches the compositions. In other words: they’re really finding the right vibe.

That title drop lyric leads into yet an entirely new section reintroducing the doomy tempo of the opener but with more rapid chord changes, once again matched up to an overlaid lead guitar melody that strongly emphasizes the chord changes themselves and keeps the energy and momentum of the track pulsing along.

Title track “Dance Across the Past” is not necessarily unprecedented in the history of metal, but still, it’s safe to say that you can call a group ambitious when the title track is the somewhat experimental piece with female clean vocals (provided by Kimberly Goss of Sinergy, later ex-wife of Children of Bodom’s Alexi Laiho) and based largely around clean guitar sections. The end result is like a distant cousin of what was happening in some portions of female vocal pop from the 90’s. Said clean guitar sections are really lovely. Humbuckers with their relatively increased output can often struggle to provide really delicate and beautiful clean sounds but they often sound rich and full when played through chorus as they are here, with Exhumation’s guitarists picking through some lovely dense chords at the start, followed by a key change to the relative major that sees some slightly more gentle, fragile chords likely familiar to any guitarist who’s spent some time playing anything derived from midwest emo. (Or, if you prefer: the verses to “Believe in Nothing” by Nevermore.) It’s these beds of lovely gentle guitar and reverberant drums that set up Goss:

My eyes will meet yours
in a swirl of time
like a whisper in your dreams
I will fly there to die

Though lyrically a little distant and once again abstract, the song manages to portray this sort of duet between her and the roars of Nokteridis as Nokteridis plays the role of all of these horrid regrets and self doubts felt by the song’s “protagonist”:

I am the one
who’s rolling through your tears
I am the passing thought
inside your untold fears

I am the one
who dances across the past
with my black heart
made of dust

That shift in perspective is unsubtly but effectively sold by the sudden cut from the gentle beds of acoustic guitars that accompany Goss to the more typically bone crunching distortion that precedes Nokteridis. This dense chorus then opens up to a climax of truly face-scrunching shredding from Marios before the pace settles once again into clean guitars and the voice of Kim Goss.

Goss’ first verse was more about interactions with an other, probably a romantic interest of some variety, with her declared intention of flying “there to die” coming off, again, romantically, as though what she sees in the eyes of this other brings some grand calm, some peace with finite life. This second verse of hers, accompanied by a different chord figure, reflects her isolation as a result of being visited by these anxieties and guilts:

The velvet night

was breathing on my soul

so lonely in my everlasting dream…

Of note here is that Nokteridis’ bass playing, often by nature buried in the mix, stands out quite nicely here, with him adding some select note fills. After Goss’ second verse that crushing chorus returns before the volume breaks back down into the chords of the intro, leaving us as we were when we started.

That gentle closing is then followed by this incredibly bombastic openings as piercing lead notes anticipate the arrival of yet more massive power chords and slow motion doom metal headbanging at the beginning of “The Slender Night,” which once the lead guitar has resolved itself, opens on the lyric from Nokteridis, I shit you not: “Where is the meaning of life?” You gotta love it when a band is bold. If the bands musical pronouncements weren’t so broadly powerful I probably wouldn’t be swallowing that, but the arrangement makes it all too easy to think of that isolated romantic figure, staring over the tops of mountains as he considers the question. Furthermore, the song just, y’know, convincingly portrays a central character at an existential crossroads with this massive arrangement crashing around him as they go through this internal struggle:

I can see my unborn fear
that’s consuming my only way out
to the light
beyond the gate of silence

Where is the meaning of life
at the empty angle of my eyes
was hovering the aura of death
is this my redemption

Here’s a thing, lyricists, certain kinds of metal lyricists especially, because I think it needs to be heard: if you have to choose between being very vague with your imagery/metaphors/etc and being a little on the nose, being a little on the nose is fine. Even if you, the performer, are not sold on the actual text, or even if you don’t really care, if your metal song is going to have lyrics it instantly makes a song better if the concepts conveyed in those lyrics are a clear fit to the vibes of the music you’re writing. It’s a lot better than just being flat out vague, which is a sin we will absolutely be discussing in further reviews. And what also helps is if you write lines like “[T]he aura of death/is this my redemption?” and then a question like that raises the level of conflict, which is then accompanied by the musical arrangement going into a faster tempo.

Our next track is the song that I think is not only the album highlight, but also flat out one of the best songs I’ve covered in this series of reviews, “Moonless Night,” which introduces itself with some anxious clean guitar lines not quite in common time until, again, some huge chords and slow motion head banging takes over, followed by one of what feels like countless great guitar melodies from this particular song over an ascending chord progression. There’s then a sudden tempo increase while the guitar lead continues that heightens the drama by emphasizing harmonic tension notes rather than chord tones, leading back into the doomier riff from earlier. This then cuts to a section of tense chords in 6/8 before cutting yet again back to 4/4 in a much faster tempo to set up my favorite lead guitar moment on the album at 1:41, where against the VI chord, the lead plays tension notes on the downbeats, the sharp 4, the major 6th, the major 7th before resolving that tension by playing chord tones over the root and VII chord. The arrangement is also fantastic here: a guitar plays the melody on the left side and is quietly doubled in the center with some tracks of rhythm guitar on the right side, with bass obviously panned directly center. The result of this is that on this section the pounding low bass notes are a lot more audible since the rhythm guitars aren’t so loud, meaning you really hear the full range of the arrangement. It all makes for an incredibly powerful moment that induces serious headbanging and really gets those DBZ super saiyan transformation gifs playing in your head. This track also has some of the better lyrics on the record. A very basic rumination on feeling directionless, with imagery reinforcing the concept of having no vision of a happy future, no light to guide.

I lay down my wings
till the clouds
will uncover the sun

A line like “walking in the desert path of my pain” reads pretty silly on its own, but it of course hits a lot harder coming from the voice of Nokterodis and fitting within the musical structure. A desert is, well, a desert, our image of a desert is not a place with a path, it’s a place where even walking in one direction is believed to possibly lead you in a circle, (“trying to escape from monotony,”) and where hunger and dehydration can lead to hallucinations. (“Reflections/are leading me to a heaven/I already lost”) It’s interesting then that Nokteridis decides to emphasize the idea of a desert at night, rather than the scorching hot desert of day time. A moonless night is an image that reflects doubt, feeling trapped and directionless.

Whereas bellowing “WALKING IN THE DESERT PATH OF MY PAIN!” is going to register for a more generous audience (me,) it’s nearly impossible to defend Nokteridis against the absolute hilarity of “Regrettable Remains” opening line: “LIFE IS COMING ON ME!” presaging the inherent memeable hilarity of Nightrage’s 2022 banger “Swallow Me.” That said, this track is another banger, both musically and lyrically. The big hook here that drops at 0:27 is a swinging hook of big barre chord voicings, a rhythm that isn’t all that common in metal, fun here even if it’s kind of a brief gimmick before returning to a more typically metal “waltz.” A speedier 4/4 section then leads back into the swinging and waltz rhythms of earlier but transposed up a half step, a transition that is repeated again later to lead into the ending and giving the track a nice transition into the next one. Lyrically, whereas “Moonless Night” used the idea of walking in a desert to reflect uncertainty (this song also refers back to that imagery near the end, “Search/somewhere in the sky a sign/that’s been forgotten,”) this track uses this idea of the wind both as a relentless (“breathless”) force of opposition that ‘scatters memories’ and blows away “dreams” with equal force.

“Sin” is a bit harder to pull apart lyrically, but it also opens on a few lines that I absolutely adore even if the greater whole is a less clear.

I can do you no harm
even though
I hide behind hatred
a child that’s hurt followed the road
all little ghosts follow
Using the excuse
Of a cruel world

Speaking of opening, “Sin” has one of the most shocking and powerful moments on an album filled with them. Going from quiet to loud is a tried and true method, popular especially in the 90’s, but the way this one goes from gentle open chords and melodies to a hardcore/thrash tempo in double-time leaves a particularly strong first impression and always gets me moving. Admittedly there’s a formula emerging at this point where the band loves abusing fairly seismic dynamic shifts, key changes (all within the circle of fifths that makes key changes not feel too jarring), thrashy aggression to massive arena-filling power chord sustains, 4/4 to 3/4, etc, but the fact of the matter is that unlike a lot of the records I’ve covered up to this point, it never feels like any one idea doesn’t get the time to shine that it deserves, nor does it feel like the band is ever moving from a good idea to a bad one. A riff salad works if all the riffs are good, plain and simple.

Picking a closer for a record when a band doesn’t set out to write an album “conceptually,” can be difficult, especially when just about any track on said record could function equally well as an opener or showstopper. Still, “My Depression,” both as a title and as a collection of musical ideas fits the concept perfectly. The evenly paced opening riff feels like a simplified restatement of the records’ primary musical ideas, the beginning of a conclusion more or less, and it suits the purpose of concluding just as well when repeated at the end. The purpose of ending is also met with the sort of explosive chorus you hear at 1:53 that eventually leads into what’s probably the best guitar solo on the record that opens with a lot of harshly-stricken staccato notes that each leave an impact before building up to the requisite ripping. This gives way to a lovely little clean section that evokes the atmosphere of the title track before crashing into one last speed metal break. The last lyrics on the record are also some of the best. The title “My Depression” is not coincidental, given how these lines depict the way that the sort of inner turmoil depicted throughout the rest of the record can have hugely adverse affects on our ability to engage in relationships with others. I’m just gonna let the entire lyric speak for itself.

An isolated shadow
lying peacefully
on an endless heaven
a corrupted soul longing for immortality
a filthy mind
fed with delightful dreams

Players in a game
somehow I feel unable to get involved

Tender blue invests the scene
with a kind of lyricism

I try to find peace
within ancient rhymes that cry of anger

Needing auxiliary channels of life
shaping a visionary company of love
inviting you into my depression

Sadistic green
completes the atmosphere of decay
I won’t find peace
in ancient rhymes that cry of anger

The record then closes on a doomy, crushing rendition of Sepultura’s “Territory,” an interesting change of pace that almost feels like an encore, a song with a sociopolitical message on a record mostly consumed with rumination and self-pity, and an uglier, simpler arrangement on a record overflowing with overdubs and melody.

Conclusion
I really can’t sell this album hard enough. Maybe calling it one of the best metal albums I’ve ever heard is an overstatement, but at the same time, I simply cannot recall the last metal album I heard that excited me this deeply. If you love the aggressive, bombastic, beautiful sound of 90’s melodic death metal, this record is a basically flawless masterpiece that you’re likely not to have heard. Spread the word, and join Exhuamation as they Dance Across The Past. S tier. 10/10. 7 stars. Whatever system you use. I BEG you to listen to this record.

-Durante Pierpaoli, Lynnwood, WA, November 2023