Arts of Desolation

Arts of Desolation is high quality melodic death metal, but a touch more brutal than you might expect. There's a machinelike relentlessness to the songs, and for the time of release a very hard, cold production. Grabowski's drumming is superb, with plenty of blasting but never too much, and the guitar solos are always melodic and tastefully structured. The vocals are very tortured and harrowing as you'd want from death metal, even melodeath. Ok, in this case melodeath with sci-fi industrial atmosphere, and appropriately dark, anti-human lyrics. When the bonus track is called Human Prey, you can be sure things are going to be quite twisted and anti-life.

Why was this album bypassed at the time, and never rediscovered since? Possibly the fact it's not only heavy but aurally and emotionally heavy. You can wallow in that kind of mess at length as a younger listener, but as time moves on the sheer durability of getting through an album that's trying to kill you becomes more specialised. And let's face it, life is also trying to kill you at the same time. On Scars we hear,

Approach the gate to your kingdom
The transformation is complete
You’ve made me a heretic
This life of mine will end in despair
All the blood on my hands

So with Arts of Desolation you have everything you'd expect from Swedish death metal, veering to melody but not always, and while not as painful as Dark Funeral, the intensity level is a lot higher than In Flames say or At the Gates. From the very first beat in Incubator, you know what's coming. Cold Flesh Colony, Embedded Insanity, all absolutely propulsive and aggressive, and dark, and just not user friendly, despite having the same elements you might find in other melodeath. The riffs are mid paced or fast, no slowdowns here. Callenish Circle and Slayer's heavier riffs are reference points. The solos, as mentioned, are usually the only break for a glimpse through the clouds.

The Second Manifest is an instrumental lull in the middle of Arts of Desolation, ominous and ethereal, it's still not exactly pleasant and ends up being a breakdown just about as heavy as any of the other tracks, maybe just slower and chuggier, and also wielding a spoken word verse, and an 80s guitar shred workout. Human Chapter X, Injected Terror, Scars, Mental Degeneration... lyrically you're getting themes of cybernetic corruption of human souls, synthetic biology, psychological torment, urban terror, spiritual decay. Perhaps being 20 years ahead of the curve is what prevented Arts of Desolation from being noted in the early 2000s. With a small spruce up, and a slight speed up, this album could be released today and still sound razor sharp and very unsettling.

Moderately technical, dark, cold, mechanistic, nihilistic, Arts of Desolation can be gruelling, but the expert song construction, tidy drumming, and melodic soloing stop The Forsaken from being outright ear-abusers. Oddly their albums either side of Arts of Desolation while still being heavy, are nowhere near as abstract and alien sounding. Whatever groove they struck with their middle album, it doesn't have any parallels in their own catalogue and while being a bit similar to Dark Funeral or Marduk, has its own identity. The downsides are only that two decades of passing time have made the production slightly quiet, a frequency boost would be great, albeit the tidiness of the album's sound is quite impressive in its own right. Apart from that, the only negative is that Arts of Desolation is just a bit odd, and doesn't let up the emotional push-pull, even for a second.

The Forsaken's albums after Arts of Desolation are much steadier, and are very catchy and well put together, but this is the album which is worth exploring and worth owning, because it's as much a soul-journey as a melodeath album. Give this one a chance if you like your melodic death metal a little harder and a lot weirder than usual.