Out of Emotional Disorder

On their 1997 debut album Swedish melodic death/thrash band Taetre were hellish and bleak. It was hardly unique, though. The Haunted unleashed their highly revered debut album in 1998. It caused loads of tremors, and not only in Sweden, but also on the other side of the Atlantic. What happened to many a Swedish metal band was that they were severely inspired by by this strike by an exciting newcomer.

It is okay to get inspired. Taetre's second album, 'Out of Emotional Disorder', came out in 1999 and guess what..?! It sounds like the band were very much inspired by this new force. It was time for leaner songs and more streetwise aggression against the debut's grim and pestilent vibes. Which, thankfully, aren't all gone! If your can imagine a sound that mixes The Haunted, Dismember and Necrophobic, you're pretty close to how Taetre fared on this album. Maybe the music was composed partly prior to and partly after The Haunted's debut. That is my guess.

This does not suffer from songs being too similar inside out. Two first songs are of that "smack yer gob" style bragging à la The Haunted and At The Gates, and at times rather bloody boring. Non-distorted guitars on 'Your Illusion Unmasked' and subsequent evil-conjuring melodiousness, tremolo riffing and wooing synthesizer are real answers to the expectations about what I expected of this album. Yes! Here we go with the real goodies! Acoustic guitar bits, canorous guitar solos and harmonics, horror synthesizers really lift the atmosphere and allow more transforming compositions, which gladly start happening after the first two songs.

The band sounds truly tight, and there's no any sloppiness plaguing this album. The guitarists hack, machinegun-fire and hammer in their riffs. The bass guitar is part of the tapestry pounding therein with the hasty drums. The sound is a bit too trebly, perhaps, but this ain't HM-2 album, but a mixture of death and black metal anyway. The vocals are about orcish lacerating throat voice. The lyrical themes are hatred, death and Clive Barker's "Nightbreed", with both typical and atypical lines.

The intro and outro are unnecessary, and I could have lived without ever hearing this rendition of Rolling Stones' classic 'Paint It, Black'! I may well be one out of one people, who does not like the original either. Here the vocals are both shouted and shrieked, and joined by horrible clean ones. I feel dirty and my ears feel raped. So, basically over 4 out of 37 minutes are total bollocks here. And that damn cover art... burns my eyes! The whole artwork and design is bad.

But do not let these dings stop you from checking this one out. Being a mixed bag, I think pros weigh over cons in the end. I do not know what the band tried with this, to hunt more money or just give tribute to their new influencer. Without thinking about that too deeply, one actually can enjoy listening to this, I believe, if a mixture of Swedish death and thrash stylings tempts.

(Originally written for ArchaicMetallurgy.com)

This is the sad story of many bands, and to that story, Taetre makes no exception. After many years of crafting a handful of tunes that would make it as your debut demo and demonstrate (what other word ?!) the world what your sound will be for the coming years and what, if, kind of « genre » your band is belonging to, you release a very promising debut album, probably unoticed by many, but that, in the future, would become a reverred piece of musical art among fans of the above-mentioned genre of yours. Taetre did, with « The Art ».

Of course, many bands eventualy would even not release a debut, some would release a crappy one. Of course, many ones will release stuff and get better and better with each release too.

But, when you release such a great piece of melodic yet aggressive thrash / death as « The Art », having taken years to write material for it, it’s rarely a good idea to release a follow up the next year with so little time in front of you to write more material for it, rehearse it, record it. And, sadly, most of the bands following that recipe fail to recapture what made their debut such a good one. Of course, there are exceptions (Metallica, Slayer…) but, most of them had an even longer demo carreer so they already had most of the material for that follow up. But, Taetre’s « Out of emotional disorder » sadly belongs to the first category : failed.

With the exception of a very dispensable intro (like on their debut), most of the time, all the material shown here, with very little exceptions riffs there and there, such as on « An epitaph carven », is just sounding weak, senseless and generic. Despite a rather good production (not better, not worse than on the previous effort), this album never matches the quality of the first one. Even the introduction of samples, like on « Die with me » or the could-have-been awesome-but-lacks-of-something cover of the Rolling Stones’ « Paint It Black » are no argument nor valuable additions able to make this follow up a step forward for the band.

It would even get worse with the third album… but that’s another story…