The most recent years of Dark Tranquillity’s career have arguably been the most exciting for the band in quite some time. After bringing their futuristic, highly polished melodic death metal sound to its logical conclusion with 2007’s
Fiction, they released the somewhat uninspired
We Are the Void before brilliantly reinventing themselves with 2013’s
Construct. This album showed the band looking both backwards and forwards for inspiration, and finding it in spades; on the one hand, they began to start using the clean vocals and stark dynamic contrasts that made albums like
Projector so successful, and at the same time, they started to explore a darker, murkier kind of songwriting that we had never quite heard from them before. “The Science of Noise” had a menacing urgency to it that was truly gripping and original; closer “None Becoming” had unbelievable tragic power; and “What Only You Know” was one of the most honest and moving songs of the band’s whole career. And this only touches on what made
Construct so good – all ten of its songs showed rich dynamics, powerful songwriting and an overall purpose to its structure that pointed ahead to a new golden age of Dark Tranquillity.
And now we have
Atoma: an album that, in some ways, continues in the footsteps of
Construct, but in other ways takes the band’s sound in another whole new direction. The dynamics and the variety of
Construct remain, as do Mikael Stanne’s wonderful clean vocals. The guitars once again provide a wide range of tones and colours to give each song its own unique flavour. What’s missing is the darkness and urgency that
Construct had – this has been replaced by a more polished production and a much greater emphasis on the keyboards, melody and texture, something that absolutely works in the album’s favour. Many of the strongest moments on the album, in fact, find themselves in the interplay between the guitars and keyboards, and the colours that they create together. In songs like “Atoma” it’s this interplay that actually makes the song spectacular; in others, like “Force of Hand”, the keyboards serve just to give the important moments an extra bit of punch. One of my favourite moments on the album is the (very brief) intro to “Neutrality”: an instance of the guitars and keyboards being so integrated with each other that you can hardly tell which notes are being played by which. The colour created by this is amazing, and it would be great to hear Dark Tranquillity experiment more with timbre like this in the future.
The weaker songs on
Atoma are the more straightforward ones that try to retread previous, more accessible ground for the band. “The Pitiless” is one of these, and it really just falls flat on its face, trying to bring back a darker, heavier sound that just isn’t in Dark Tranquillity’s palate anymore. Riffs, in general, don’t seem to be a strong point on this album, and it’s the more riff-based songs that fail to succeed as much as the others. Perhaps when the band composed these types of songs, they were consciously trying to pander to their fans’ wishes rather than following their own inspiration, which seems to be overwhelmingly moving in the direction of melody and colour. I could even go so far as to say it’s the
softer moments that are the strongest; something that may make certain fans gasp in horror but that I (and probably a lot of other fans) find very interesting and exciting. It’s in the moments like, again, the intro to “Neutrality”, or the bridges of “Faithless by Default” and “Caves and Embers” that I really feel this album’s magic coming through, and I wish there were a greater emphasis on music like this rather than the half-hearted attempts to recreate a heavier past.
Construct was able to revel in both its heaviness and its atmosphere, but for
Atoma, it’s clearly the latter that reigns supreme.
Atoma will probably be a bit of a surprise for a lot of Dark Tranquillity fans. Rather than continuing in the direction that
Construct established, the band has chosen to make yet another sharp turn in their sound, a turn that some may not find to be as ideal or as exciting as that that they took on
Construct. However,
Atoma is nevertheless highly rewarding, and shows a lot of interesting new ideas that the band could very well develop into another masterpiece. What I hope for now is that they consolidate their sound and choose the elements that they want to develop on the next album. While it’s certainly been interesting to hear these two transitional, experimental albums, what Dark Tranquillity needs is to make a unified and powerful statement with the next one – something that I definitely think they have in them, and that I’m sure that they’ll arrive at eventually. For now, though, we now have two very interesting and unique albums to enjoy, and while it would maybe be more
satisfying to indulge in a brand new masterpiece, the uncertainty and anticipation that these albums have left for us is very exciting indeed.
