Damned Spirits’ Dance - Weird Constellations

August 6, 2009

Reviewer: Matt

Looking at its album artwork will give you a pretty good idea of what Weird Constellations sounds like.  Damned Spirits’ Dance embrace the same image and carnivalesque techno/black metal hybrid as the seminal Arcturus. Notwithstanding a regrettable faithfulness to their lineage, Damned Spirits’ Dance excels at combining prototypical representations of several genres into surprisingly well arranged and rather memorable songs.

DSD’s 2005 EP The Growing Spirit was an average release - heavy black/death metal in the aesthetic language of La Masquerade Infernale or early Angizia.  It was clear evidence of a band that hadn’t matured compositionally, but I anticipated a more accomplished follow-up.  DSD quickly realized that electronic music is all the rave to imitate for a melodic black metal fusion band and plunder Arcturus’s next album (The Sham Mirrors) for ideas, exaggerating the harsher black elements and replacing Arcturus’s occasional breakbeat experimentations with mainstream electronic music (trance and Europop) passages.  It’s condescending in its obviousness but it goes through the motions compellingly enough to sustain moderate interest and repeated listens.

Like the pop music it so adores, Weird Constellations is amazingly catchy.  And like pop music, though I probably will forget it exists in a few months, I have fun every time I listen to it. “TSS - Toxic Shock Syndrome” is a melodeath track with cool spacey keyboard effects and a rousing chorus.  “Fake” alternates between Dissection-riffs and trancey club-thumpers, with an interlude of acoustic noodling and vocalist Sinox doing his best Trickster G.  There are nice female vocals passages throughout.  The production is top-notch.  The album closer - a manipulative and maudlin acoustic ballad complete with self-pitying emo lyrics - is outrageously addictive. 

I imagine these guys are great live.  They excel as performers, and I bet their songs can really rouse a crowd at a show. But Weird Constellations is sanitized fun for the entire family.  It takes the hate out of black metal and the ecstasy of out rave music.  This reviewer prefers something more sincere, less safe, and with more to say.

Release Date: April 20th, 2009
Label:  Code666 Records
(Aural Music)

TRACK LISTING

1.  Visioner
2.  Cold Winds - A Dream Vision
3.  Devil's on His Way
4.  TSS
5.  Black Savage
6.  Weird Constellations
7.  The Angel and the Dark River
8.  Raven
9.  ...So Much to Say...
     So I Rather Tell None
10.  Fake
11.  Guess, I'm Dying

Total playing time:  55:24

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