Sing Along Songs for the Damned & Delirious

As I mentioned on a previous review, "Butcher's Ballroom" exhibits Diablo Swing Orchestra's flawless cohesion between a variety of genres to create a unique and entertaining sound. Back in 2006, the band knew what they were doing. But then 2009 came, and Diablo Swing Orchestra got a little tipsy on Siberian booze, resulting in them throwing up "Sing Along Songs for the Damned and Delirious". Yes, this isn't that 16th century orchestra from Sweden anymore that were so precise and professional in their aristocratic performance. They've turned into a mediocre troupe that always plays a random amalgamation of cliched songs while they're deliriously drunk.

Talking about cliches, "Sing Along Songs" is chock full of them. "A Tap Dancer's Dilemma" is a plain rip-off of swing jazz from the 30's with metal carelessly plastered over it. "A Rancid Romance" is no different from any typical tango piece, with the guitars failing to come up with anything interesting apart from the mundane thumping along to the tango rhythm. "Vodka Inferno" fails to show much creativity as well, being just a half-hearted attempt at mashing opera and circus music together. These tracks have no sense of identity at all, sounding mostly like often-heard stereotypical tunes that the band attempted to cover. The heavy metal element sticks out so blandly that it makes almost every song seem like it's following this formula:

Heavy Metal + (insert random genre) = A track on "Sing Along Songs"

Fortunately, despite those tracks suffering from being horrible cliched, they are at least kind of fun to listen to. For the songs that did not follow that formula, they just come across as awkward or plain boring. I have no idea what the band is trying to achieve with "Bedlam Sticks". It makes me feel that the band is trying too hard to be quirky. "New World Windows" sounds almost like a demo song that didn't manage to make it onto "Butcher's Ballroom". It's practically a watered down version of Infralove, being painfully obvious in its lack of passion. "Stratosphere Serenade" also fails to be an emotionally-impacting closure, spending the last three and a half minutes on nothing but the same electronic loop over and over again!

As a fan on Diablo Swing Orchestra, I expect them to be able to match up to the really high bar that they have raised for themselves with their debut. "Sing Along Songs" utterly discards what I ultimately appreciate about the band: cohesion. Every song is unable to blend the many different timbres together. Even the album as a whole sounds like a complete clusterfuck, lacking even the most minuscule trace of identity. Still, it manages to be a pretty fun album to listen to for those who wish to hear 'metallised' versions of genre cliches. The band members also show little signs of sloppiness, still performing confidently with their instruments despite the lackluster composition. It is quite depressing to hear the sheer degree of effort they have put into playing bland renditions of songs that they obviously have surpassed in terms of experimentation and creativity.

If you just want a fun simple avant-gardy album, "Sing Along Songs" would fit the bill just fine. Don't expect anything amazing though, because this album is short of the creative capabilities that Diablo Swing Orchestra can offer,

Diablo Swing Orchestra is possibly the most bizarre mix I've ever heard of metal guitars, opera vocals, and odd instrumentation. If you've not heard them, picture swing music, opera, gypsy, tango, jazz, and God only knows what else, mixed up in a blender, and seasoned with madness. THAT's Diablo Swing Orchestra!

This album would be worth listening to if the only track on it were the joyously insane "Bedlam Sticks." Describing this track is difficult, but I'll give it a try: it begins with a punchy, jazzy riff like a video game theme, followed by bizarre theatrical vocals, (male and female). This is followed by some hammering guitar work mixed with Munchkin vocals, reminiscent of the German punker Nina Hagen. The song charges headlong through all kinds of weirdness, has a little bass-powered instrumental break, and we even hear some trombone in there somewhere. The lyrics are something indecipherable about an insane asylum. It's sheer craziness, but a hell of a lot of fun.

But "Bedlam Sticks" is not the only good track on the record. We get the danceable but operatic "New World Windows," the Russian style circus sound of "Vodka Inferno" with its echoes of Fiddler on the Roof or something, and the Glenn Miller on steroids big band mania of "Tap Dancer's Dilemma" (another track that is simply hellaciously fun. The guitar work throughout the album is constantly changing in style, and always chock full of energy. The vocals--my God, the vocals are such a bizarre blend of opera, circus ringmaster, Andrews Sisters jazz, and other weirdness, they have to be heard to be believed.

Another review here called the album "clusterfuckery," and I guess that's fair, too. Definitely, not everyone is going to love this: it's too avant -garde for lots of metal fans, and too heavy for most avant-garde fans. But I have such fun listening to it, I can't keep from smiling as I listen. I guess many metal fans like to be angry or dark, but for those of us that still like a good fun time, DSO brings it in spades. If you're not afraid of something a little different, give this a listen. You may be surprised at how infectious their brand of madness is.

The name says it all, basically: Diablo Swing Orchestra play big-band swing beefed up with heavy guitars and bass below the horns and chorus-girls, with a lunatic ringmaster thing going on for the lead vocals. Listening to Sing Along Songs for the Damned and Delirious is like doing acid at a very weird circus somewhere just outside of Prague in the company of a troupe of odd-ball Swedish metal musicians and a large crate of vodka… and is actually a lot more fun than that description might imply.

Naturally, if you’ve an aversion to gimmick bands in general (or swing in particular), Sing Along Songs… is not for you. But this is Diablo Swing Orchestra‘s second album, and that fact alone should suggest that the musicians themselves aren’t bored of the gag just yet. And why should they be? After all, aping the big-band style gives you a whole bunch of new tones and structures to play with, provided you’ve got the compositional chops to break out of the clichés and really work with the format.

And boy, have they ever gone to town with the instrument cupboard. While chugging guitars are commonplace, they’re far from ubiquitous, and Sing Along Songs… calls on a vast cast of other instruments to keep things moving. Cool-cat upright bass sashays about the place like a black-clad version of Jessica Rabbit, brass sections parp and stab you in the eardrums, and synths and samba percussion and accordions and pianos and hell knows what else wander into and out of the soundscape with all the perfectly-choreographed chaos of a Broadway production. The initial novelty value of the Diablo Swing Orchestra concept fades after three or four songs, and it’s at this point that most gimmick albums fail. However, Sing Along Songs… has enough songwriting flair to keep you diverted all the way through.

“A Rancid Romance” mashes up mariachi horns and castanets with operetta caterwauling and martial snare rolls, while “Bedlam Sticks” amps up the circus theatrics with rolling cod accents alternating with weirdly distorted demon-voices, vividly aping the madness implied in the title. “New World Widows” opens with acoustic arpeggios before rolling drums and chugging guitars pick up the sinister-pantomime vibes again, and “Siberian Love Affairs” brings the oom-pah rhythms alongside what sounds like the drunken mumbling of two dozen Bolshevik-era vodka-hall patrons before ramping up the surrealism. But it’s album closer “Stratosphere Serenade” that really does it for me: a tour-de-force of mad and sprawling dynamics, with the vocals taking the back seat.

All in all, it’s a good gimmick done with class and attention to detail – far less a one-trick-pony than single-gag bands like Austrian Death Machine, for example – but it doesn’t quite have the narrative subtlety and in-depth weirdness of Rasputina. I’m not sure I’d listen to Diablo Swing Orchestra very often, but if the mood was right and I fancied a bit of a sing-song while doing the housework, Sing Along Songs for the Damned and Delirious might well get a high volume airing.

This review was originially written at http://www.rock-metal-music-reviews.com on September 17th, 2009 by The Editor

Definitely the most daunting thing about Diablo Swing Orchestra is trying to accept their wide ramifications that can conjure a mixture of emotions, albeit both good and bad perspectives have a stranglehold on the listener‘s threshold. I can give “Sing-Along Songs for the Damned and Delirious” a million labels: surreal, majestic, poetic, annoying, putrid, burdensome, unique, bombastic, or otherworldly perhaps. I felt all these words were, at one time or another, fitting for Diablo Swing Orchestra’s rioting journey. But after a lot of listening, I have made my final verdict: this is miserably brilliant. Yes, these avant-garde champs are certainly beyond the norm, but with so much craziness even Cthulhu could feel a little batty after witnessing this balance of absurd thoughts and ideas.

“Sing Along Songs” is rather special in that it blends a combination of opposite-spectrum music together as one, including opera, swing music, and metal. This conjures two thoughts: it’s metal, swing music, and opera, but on the other hand, it’s metal, swing music, and opera. Anticlimactic, I know. I guess each side brings a suitable cut of bacon home, like the female soprano vocalist, whom is absolutely fantastic, whereas her male counterpart does a bang-up job as well; both singers are versatile and fitting for these strange landscapes. There really isn’t anything cynical to add about the song structures, because any group that can mend so many atypical identities into a single entity and avoid a total head-on collision altogether deserves a proper salute, but that doesn‘t change the fact it‘s a portable headache on plastic. There’s just so many ideas smashing together that it does, in fact, become very difficult to understand what in the blue hell is going on. At times the record is cool, but at other intervals the band shoots, rapes, stabs, punches, kicks, immolates, skins, butchers, and pisses on the dead horse again and again and again.

I’m afraid there is such a thing as “too crazy“ for the adventurer’s tongue, so to speak. It’s clear they get a little caught up in the web from tangling everything together: some choruses get messy, vocals become tied, brass instruments sporadically fire…it quickly becomes an aftermath between a tornado and a shed. Also, where are the riffs? What about the passion? A lot of this stuff seems very uninspired and oddly bland once the bizarre predictability settles in, making the record plain ‘ol boring after ten minutes. It’s no display of irony that the album’s finest moments shine when the group rests on a steady idea instead of throwing a wild orgy of everything imaginable together, like the menacing riffing on “A Rancid Romance” or the trumpet section towards the end of “Lucy Fears the Morning Star.” The self-proclaimed masters of “riot-opera” proudly demonstrate a special mixture of metal, opera, brass instruments, and 30s swing music among different musical situations that is so individualistic you might feel this is sheer brilliance…or complete crap, whichever sounds better.

In other words, it’s like that time when Mr. Burns (The Simpsons, anyone?) went to the Mayo Clinic and found out he had every disease ever (even hysterical pregnancy) but wasn’t ill because of the Three-Stooges Syndrome: a woo-woo-woo-based idea that all the viruses and bugs were plugged in his bloodstream because there were so many of them trying to get through at once; that’s Diablo Swing Orchestra in a nutshell. There are so many things both right and wrong with this record not even the time-space continuum can comprehend what the hell is going on, and I frankly feel the same. I can go either way on this one, so give this a listen if you’re an experimental freak, but expect a plethora of strangeness and don’t have high expectations. It's very possible they will get smashed.

This review was written for: www.Thrashpit.com

After falling in love with The Butcher's Ballroom and hearing that the Swedish visionaries were coming out with a new album, I had already decided that Sing-Along Songs for the Damned and Delirious would be the album of the year. Of course, everyone knows going in with overly high expectations is a bad idea, however, the debut left huge shoes to fill and Sing-Along Songs just did not fill them.

When the album first starts, you immediately get the insanely fun fusion of elements that is Diablo Swing Orchestra. The metal, the swing, the opera, the energetic blast of the brass...Of course, even in the first track alone, it's well done and stuffed with hundreds of fresh ideas. But it lacks the appeal of the first album, tracks are less memorable and too "full" for their short length. There's enough material here packed into 10 songs that would probably have worked better in about 20 songs. Individual tracks don't seem to have a constant theme, and are instead just a jumble of ideas.

One of the highlights of The Butcher's Ballroom was when the amazing soprano Ann-Louice Lögdlund would surprise us with one of those brilliant high notes and just take our breath away. However on Sing-Along Songs, although her voice is amazing as ever, it is always going, always hitting those high notes. It takes out the awe that her vocals brought in the first album. The main vocalist of the last album, the smooth, clean voice of Daniel Håkansson, is hardly present, and there is a new operatic male voice singing lines. Also, their lines were unclear and the lyrics are almost impossible to decipher. Despite the obvious talents of the vocalists, the vocal performances were a bit of a let down.

By no means was this album bad or even disappointing, it just felt lackluster compared to the debut. Diablo Swing Orchestra, a heavily influenced and inspired group of people, have released another enjoyable album. Though far from perfect, and very far from the best they can do, DSO's Sing-Along Songs For The Damned And Delirious is an essential album for fans of the debut and metalheads looking for a bit more fun and originality in their collection.