In Flames — The Lunar Strain (1994)

In 1993 a guy named Jesper Stromblad quit his traditional Swedish death metal band Ceremonial Oath to focus on his more melodic side project, In Flames, and he showed up to Studio Fredman with a few songs and a few studio musicians, more or less. The result was The Lunar Strain, which I’m pleased to report after ignoring it for years is stylistically similar and nearly on par with what the band would be doing on The Jester Race and Whoracle. The Lunar Strain basically stands alone as the first convincing, great melodic death metal record, and, to this writer, began a streak of basically-perfect albums by this band that continued until at least 2006.

Speaking of albums that In Flames would record later: To a guy like me, this is almost cheating. The Lunar Strain opens up with “Behind Space”, a song re-recorded as “Behind Space 99” for the Colony album which, spoiler alert: is, at least currently, my favorite metal album. Even without that context, it’d be hard to deny the power of this opening riffs, and as well the fucking iconic opening lines:

Call me by my astral name

breeding fear through wordless tongue

Heavenly thirst — unspeakable pain

Emptied from all human motion

Confront the faceless wrath.

I love “Behind Space”, it’s one of the best songs on Colony and it’s one of the best songs on this record by default. It’s got everything, sweet harmonized riffs, low-string chunkiness, and the first of the almost folk-metal riffs they would employ from here until about Colony. There are some funny differences though, including an utterly goofy horror movie synth during the break, and a really sloppy harmonized lead. As well, as soon as the song ends it cuts to an acoustic guitar interlude that shows off that weird folk influence I mentioned before, it’s a fine interlude but the sudden cut in is jarring. All said though, “Behind Space”, musically and lyrically, is a perfect introduction to In Flames.

While the band would later tune down to C standard for The Jester Race and beyond, Lunar Strain was recorded in D standard, the tuning Death used. As such, while the songwriting is, of course, exactly what we could come to expect from In Flames for the rest of the 90’s, the timbre is brighter and gives the album a slightly more aggressive feel, especially when paired with the straightforward recording that captures what was at the time a piercing, utterly dry guitar tone. The lush tones of The Jester Race were to be found over the horizon, but not here.

I don’t want to dwell on this as it’s something to discuss later, but it’s important to note that this lineup of In Flames is completely different from today, and not in a small way. Nobody who recorded this album is actually in the band anymore.

Of least note is rhythm guitarist Carl Naslund, who was also credited on In Flames’ 93 demo and then seemingly disappears unfortunately, I hope he’s well. (Encyclopedia Metallum claims he did not play guitar on the demo, I have not been able to source that claim.) Bass is played by Johan Larsson, who really doesn’t stick out at all, but did manage to stick around in the band till 1998 and seems to still be at least tangentially connected to the Gothenburg metal scene, so good for him. Lead guitars were handled by Glenn Jlungstrom, I’ll talk about his contributions later on. Maybe most surprising of all is that Jesper Stromblad, lead songwriter, actually is behind the kit playing drums on this record.

The most interesting difference in lineup is Mikael Staane of Dark Tranquillity who worked as a session vocalist/lyricist on this album before DT recorded Skydancer. Funny enough, though you may already know this, Anders Friden actually did vocals for that album before joining In Flames. While he doesn’t quite sound like “himself” as we would come to know him he’s still very talented on this record, especially surprising as at that point he was the rhythm guitarist in Dark Tranquillity. And perhaps he deserves more credit than I have ever given him for, as on both this song and “In Flames” itself, he establishes the early lyrical identity of the group as a hazy mix of cosmic horror and fantasy imagery mixed with a particular sense, like At The Gates, of personal misery sewn into the fabric of that imagery, an idea that Staane would excel at himself on the earliest Dark Tranquillity records before diving into the deep end of his own abstract imagery later on.

As the title would seem to indicate, the aforementioned cosmic horror is particularly prevalent here. “Behind Space” seems to describe contact with some sort of astral being that transports the listener to “dimensions behind space” located “beyond all galaxies/through timeless aeons of frost,” where once mortal beings sought to challenge the heavens:

Through twisted ruins of uncompleted dreams

Sights of towers reaching for the moon

Clawing at the skies — they gonna pull it down.[sic]

The title track describes, what else, a virus that can travel through space, but one that itself seems to have conscious form:

For there is a purpose and reason

Beyond all human apprehension

The shrieking silence in the blackness of space

For there is a knowledge more complex

Than life on this planet

A knowledge in tune with the progress of stars

Lunar strain

All across the milky way

Life suffers defeat

Life that once was treasured

On “Lunar Strain” Mikaeel Staane coins the word “starforsaken” as more or less an alternative to “god forsaken” to describe the state of that affected by the “lunar strain” itself, it’s followed by the song “Starforsaken”, which has some slightly more literal imagery that depicts a character, already deeply wounded, bound by his joints to be a sacrifice to an unknown something in the desert, and of course, forsaken by the stars, the fates. Appropriately, after the instrumental “Dreamscape”, the following two “Everlost” songs depict a slow transition from a decaying physical state to an eternal, cosmic one, a journey that is sad and not altogether peaceful. On their own, the songs from “Behind Space” until the end of “Everlost Part 2” seem to almost indicate a purposeful, continuous concept, showing through the windows of mortal eyes the fear of the infinite as one shifts from life to death, making the grouping more or less an extended “Side A” to this album. This is a lyrically powerful record where the track order accentuates the themes of each song and the progression of the sound.

As well on the sound: Lunar Strain’s first four songs come in at a hot tempo, but the two part “Everlost” starts with what is essentially doom metal before “Part 2” which is, no asterisk, literally just a neo-folk track that moves at a leisurely pace, making the two songs about slowly dying the two slowest songs on the album. Synergy between music and lyrics? That’s the good shit.

We follow with the album’s second instrumental (and I think fourth actual interlude, if we’re counting), an instrumental rendition of the Swedish traditional song “Hargalaten” whose lyrics depict the devil drawing the people of a town underneath a tree and playing the violin for them, forcing them to dance until they are dead. Makes sense for a metal band. I’ve seen pushback on describing certain aspects of IF’s early sound as “folky” but the band is being pretty insistent here: their approach to writing simple melodies is inspired at least in part by the shape of these traditional melodies, and the chords that are played behind them. These influences and frequent breaks from the death metal chaos make a record that could simply come off as edgy instead feel, for lack of a better word, spiritual. It is, again, an element that creates synergy between what the record sounds like and what the record is theoretically “trying to say.”

Admittedly, with the journey that one goes on listening to the “extended side A” as I described it, the truncated “Side B” can resultantly feel a little “tacked-on” if we had to call it that. I did find a reason for that: the last three songs on this album are actually re-recordings of the three songs from their 93 demo, placed in the same order, here at the end of the record rather than the beginning (a wise move), performed in virtually the same fashion but using the Studio Fredman equipment.

Here’s where I address Glen Jlungstrom’s lead guitar playing. The short version is that the type of leads Glen liked to play on these songs is not quite what we’d come to expect given the lead guitar sections on the previous album. He prefers the blues rock stuff. There’s nothing inherently wrong about playing this way, even over melodic death metal . . . but I sure do hate it. I mentioned how goofy the keyboard is in “Behind Space” and the comical track cut to the folk interlude, and in a similar fashion, the tortured bends at the beginning of “In Flames” genuinely made me laugh, and so did the solo near the end. It’s equally funny when he cuts into the beginning of “Upon An Oaken Throne” and genuinely sounds like a solo Quorthon would cut on a Bathory record. One of the old ones.

I addressed this in my review of Arch Enemy’s Black Earth which I’ve actually already drafted so I’ll quote it here:

I’m sorry but I really don’t need to hear the soulful blues licks of melodic death metal players, or really pretty much any metal guitarist who isn’t Tony Iommi. (Let it be known I officially certify Tony Iommi as having That Stank and I am ok with him playing blues leads.) It’s one thing to hear a little pentatonic, but when it starts getting into the cliches that were hammered dead in the 70’s (and 60’s, and 50’s, and 40’s) it not only sounds stupid in the context of the genre but it just feels like a really stupid grab at some sort of false authenticity. Having a basic command of blues lead guitar playing does not make you “authentic”, it makes you someone who’s picked up a guitar and learned how to play rock music in the past 50 years. Most importantly the slow, torturous bends you are playing do not add any “realness” to the music that wasn’t already there. Perhaps hearing these types of licks unlocks something within others that it doesn’t do for me, but I’m always shocked by the inauthenticity of these types of licks when they occur.

Given the unusual lead guitar choices, paired with as well the unusual (for In Flames) technicality and a few more straightforward death metal riffs on “Upon An Oaken Throne”, as well as the brief lengths for both “Oaken Throne” and album closer “Clad in Shadows”, the overall cohesion of the album itself is hurt a little bit by feeling somewhat like two combined EPs, but what ultimately saves this from being a downer ending is that, like the tracks before it, the final three are each great songs filled with great riffs.

As well, Mikael Staane is still standing and delivering. On “In Flames” he clearly establishes the romantic identity of the band with the awesome opening lines:

Behold the heart of mine in flames
A top the highest mountain

Below the darkest depths

In the valley of hate I wander

My frost bitten heart is set ablaze, set ablaze

He continues in “Oaken Throne” with a fantasy narrative of a king stricken down at his throne by some supernatural force that has plenty of strong imagery, and on “Clad In Shadows” he leaves us with this to end our ride:

I ask no more

A life has just begun

Never will I see the sun

And do I miss it

No, my eyes are black

Emotions fled through eyelids closed

Throne of thorns

Clad in shadows

Conclusion: The Lunar Strain is a near-masterpiece by a band who would only proceed to improve, forgotten only due to its small dissimilarities with the later lineup and sound of In Flames. If you are a fan of melodic death metal, you owe it at least some of your time. Debut albums can be a mixed bag, but this is an album recorded by people who knew exactly what they wanted the record to be before ever coming to the studio, and it shows. It starts a little weaker than it ends, but such is metal, such is life. Every time I think I’m done being impressed by In Flames, I discover yet new depths to their greatness. Listen to this.