Review Summary: An Acid Journey To The Center Of The Rain
Italy, September 1994. Angry fans broke the record stores’ vitrines after they realized that the new Tiamat album hadn’t arrived in their country. Why this extremism, why this destructive attitude? "Wildhoney" was expected as a revolution of the entire metal current, Tiamat making an announcement that their new release would be a total evolution in their style and a switch to the gothic current. With a wide suite of fans, Tiamat released "Wildhoney" with great publicity, the record being expected by almost every fan of the Swedish metal scene.
The album was a departure from the death-doom style of their previous efforts and an entrance into the gothic scene, marked by exuberant psychedelic accents. Soaked in keyboards, full of harmonies inspired by Pink Floyd and the keeper of a suave depressive character, "Wildhoney" exhibited what was the most beautiful and impressive in gothic-metal or psychedelic-rock, the melodic substance articulated with transcendental musical expression. Considered Tiamat’s magnum opus, the album was one of the very few gothic metal albums that created their own complex and viable world, a metaphysical space dictated by hallucinogenic mushrooms, caught in the meshes of a dark afternoon. Vanguardist, exclusivist, and frightening, "Wildhoney" summed up the LSD-inspired sound and the depressive, morbid death-metal character, influenced by a discreet doom-print.
Like a blend between "Ummagumma" and Swedish metal, the album feels like a journey between universes and spaces. Alternating descriptions of the subterranean world with astral perceptions and figures, Tiamat creates a gloomy meditation on human misery, sadness, and depression, full of occult suggestions. The work sounds like an acid trip dominated by melodious expressions of dread. In many passages, it feels like a direct homage to Pink Floyd, a character remarked, from the smart use of the keyboards. Eviting kitsch and novelty, the band offers a flowing musical structure with a magnificent resistance in time.
Furthermore, the album’s construction is profoundly homogenous. Between the moments, it establishes an indivisible bond, a conceptual thread that amplifies the drugged eeriness of the atmosphere. The suggestive power affirms, with every sound contoured by the touching arrangements, the impression of a monument’s ruin covered in moss, bringing back to life the gothic images of Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein. Also, the lyrical content emphasizes the shocking images in a nervous way. The strange depressive character descends into a disturbing portrayal of a drug trip. Although the poetic depictions are meant to shock, the harmonious musical moments draw a sketch of a grandiose secluded castle, the entire conception obtaining a further dimension expressed by the architectural structure of harmonies that conceive an imagined past.
"Wildhoney" amazes with its solemn flow, the songs being united with a drowsy sound that practically ignores the virtuosity in favor of the atmosphere. The ambient is the main factor in Tiamat’s universe, the album’s key being the unity between rough moments and beautiful passages that are connected with a solemn ambiguity. Even if the album isn’t highlighted by a great interpretation (because it doesn’t benefit from an admirable technical level), "Wildhoney" still represents a peak of the nineties’ metal. It succeeds in combining the depth of ritualic psychedelic rock with the turmoil of the Swedish death-doom scene, resulting in a hybrid of what was essential from the two musical definitions.
By an imponderable weight, Wildhoney’s magnum opus continues to be a stylistic peak and a rainy exercise in a disparate esotericism that merits multiple listens. In spite of some underwhelming reviews that criticize the commercial and somewhat accessible approach, Tiamat made a nearly unanimously acclaimed masterwork that stays strong in a contradictory discography that will follow a downward spiral after this point. The band tried to repeat the force of their masterwork, denigrating its status. That underlines the singularity of "Wildhoney", an album which sounds like a revelatory expressionist portrait of a cloudy day, when the light of a darkened sun increases the untold mystery.
