Review Summary: A strong but somewhat sub-par album that is a tad too unimpressive and similar to The Gallery to be anything more than ‘pretty good’.
What do you do when you’re following up your best album? I doubt that’s what the members of Dark Tranquillity were thinking as they made
The Mind’s I, but more than a decade after the fact, it’s basically what they were doing.
The Gallery still stands tall as their greatest accomplishment, but like the
Magical Mystery Tour of their career, the album after it is often overlooked. Oddly enough, there are a couple good reasons for Dark Tranquillity’s (third) album is usually absent from discussions about their music.
Placed right in between the all-powerful
The Gallery and out-of-left-field
Projector,
The Mind’s I is just what you’d probably expect: a continuation of the old-school DT sound from the former half of their career. The production is a bit rough, riffs and harmonization abound with no complementary keyboards, and Stanne’s roar loses some of its power and clarity. Without Brandstrom as a band member, the core melodic death metal sound sounds thrash-influenced instead of, uh, “electronica-influenced”. Sound like the formula for
The Gallery? Oh yeah.
Dark Tranquillity almost always make sure to explode through the door when starting an album, and this is no exception. “Dreamlore Degenerate” wastes no time in beginning the riff-fest that is the twelve tracks here. Like so many of the other songs, it features a bit more harmonization than usual between guitarists Fredrik Johansson and Niklas Sundin. Most of the drumming plays a slightly more central role than it would on later records, and likewise isn’t as neatly produced as it would be later. The same is true of the other instrumentation, such that (in production terms)
The Mind’s I sounds a bit like an early Metallica record: rough and gritty while certainly not so raw that it’s a bad thing. Former bassist Martin Henriksson is more easily heard as well, and Mikael Stanne’s scream sounds extremely raw, losing a tiny of power that fans of their later albums are accustomed to.
How does this translate to the songs themselves? Most of them follow the formula laid out by “Dreamlore Degenerate”: loads of quick, heavy riffs; equally quick and slightly thrash-like drumming; harshly screamed lyrics and some catchy lead parts here and there. A few of the songs feature use of clean guitars, and like
Damage Done,
The Mind’s I ends with a purely instrumental closing track (the difference being it happens to work this time). While the songwriting is usually fairly simple, it never becomes a real problem, and a couple songs set themselves apart via more elaborate songwriting (“Insanity’s Crescendo”), multiple tempo changes (“Tidal Tantrum”), or simply being unusually short (“Dissolution Factor Red”).
There’s just one problem with all this: inconsistency.
The Mind’s I doesn’t contain any duds, but much like
Character, most of the songs that aren’t noteworthy sound a bit too much like each other. Either that, or they’re just forgettable when placed in a discography as big as this one. Songs such as “Still Moving Sinews”, “Atom Heart 243.5” and “Constant” do very little to impress after you’ve had time to absorb the band’s better albums. That’s even made worse by the inclusion of “Insanity’s Crescendo”, which is a career highlight due to the use of catchy female vocals and – you guessed it – a slow building crescendo. Placed right in the middle, it soon becomes the centerpiece of the album, and each listen brings anticipation of this (near) 7-minute high point.
On its own, there isn’t really anything wrong with
The Mind’s I. There are numerous great songs to found here, it contains both the band’s shortest and longest song, and it has the second best instrumental they’ve done (the first being “Mine is the Grandeur…”). For a longtime fan, however, nearly everything about the album is so similar to
The Gallery that you can’t help but feel it’s a second-rate sequel. It’s because of this that the main demographic for
The Mind’s I is anyone looking to complete their DT discography, and
not a first time listener.
Recommended Tracks:
Dreamlore Degenerate
Dissolution Factor Red
Insanity’s Cresendo
Tidal Tantrum
