Artist: Beyond Twilight
Label: Massacre Records
Release: 2001
I was browsing the usually pathetic shelves of one of Slovenia’s metal shops when I nearly keeled over. With almost a year gone since the official release, and the debut from these Scandinavian gloom-prog merchants having been sitting in stores all over Europe for ages, “The Devil’s Hall Of Fame” has finally (surely by accident) made its way into Slovenia.
The masters of singing about sorrow, dressing in black and calling on death are, of course, Scandinavian souls. And how do they channel all that through progressive music?
“Beyond Twilight” launched a message a good month before 9/11 (“That beautiful day, or George goes to the pub”), and it can be a real revelation. Don’t take it deadly seriously (or do, if you’re strong enough), because it might affect your life negatively (?). The life of electric insects with washed-out brains, implants with microchips. Safe in the embrace of the institution, surrounded by mounds of pills, material goods and endlessly devoted to religion. Eternal prisoners of fear. Fear of whom? The fear is implanted. All of this is revealed to a person with the code 29031972 (a birth date), who touches his virtual god, the universal truth, when he manages to hack into his own brain with the help of a computer. All his insights (the truth) are so powerful that the implants are doomed the moment they come into contact with it. Just the right provocation for this overstuffed, crazy world, where pleasure, goodies and love (the order of the enlightened calls them “ideals” these days) are only made possible through movies, books, the tabloid press, in short, through money. Even the ideals are implanted. And the implants are getting nastier by the day, so they won’t survive Judgment Day, because the revelation of truth will kill them. Life is something more, there is no death. There is no God. Everything we perceive is just an insignificant illusion. A fragment of time. And since there’s no time either, that makes it eternity.
The conceptual music is built on heavy, rolling riffs, and the motifs keep weaving through each other, so the music shifts from full-on psychedelia to perfectly polished melody (“Shadowland”) and sits entirely in minor keys. It’s all so sad. Across the whole record the music builds a stuffy, foggy atmosphere draped in endless night and rain (like in the film “Blade Runner”). The electric guitar is balanced by the keyboards, and the job of its heavy riffs is to lift the atmosphere in the calmer sections and at the many transitions. The ambient keyboards of the brilliant Finn Zierler, who dreamed up this concept and assembled the excellent musicians in the “Beyond Twilight” lineup, are the driving force. The motifs fit the messages in the lyrics perfectly (they amplify them). Where drama is needed, guitars and keyboards hit all at once. But lest anyone think Anders Kragh hides behind rhythm riffing: right in the opener “Hellfire” he shows what the Swedish school of electric guitar is all about, with filigree-clean arpeggios and fingers gliding softly over the fretboard.
But it would all be for nothing without the most important link in the lineup. That is undoubtedly Jörn Lande, with his colorful palette of vocal skills. A Norwegian who, for me personally, is the absolute top when it comes to vocals in the new wave of metal. Where the drama needs stirring up he screams furiously, and he sings perfectly with breath control too (like David Coverdale or Robert Plant in the post-Zeppelin era). In short, at every point he throws himself completely into the role of number 29031972. Uncompromisingly energetic! The general impression of rationally whiny Scandinavian singers fades away completely when you listen to Lande.
This is undoubtedly a different kind of album. Grab it.
Lineup
Jorn Lande – vocals
Anders Kragh – guitar
Finn Zierler – keyboards
Anders Lindgren – bass guitar
Tomas Froden – drums
Production
Tommy Hansen & Beyond Twilight
Tracklist
1. Hellfire
2. Godless and Wicked
3. Shadowland
4. Devil’s Waltz [Instrumental]
5. Crying
6. Devil’s Hall of Fame
7. Closing the Circle [Instrumental]
8. Perfect Dark
Album length: 45.48
