Witherscape
The Inheritance

I think we got the answer to the age old question "how would Ayreon sound if Arjen had been a death metal fan instead of prog head?". The answer is Dying For The Sun on Whitescapes debut album 'The Inheritance'. And somehow it feels quite logical that it sounds like this as the man behind the band is the Arjen Lucassen of death metal: Dan Swanö.

The Swede presented himself in the late '80s and has since more or less dominated the death metal genre with bands like Edge Of Sanity, Nightingale and Bloodbath (just to name a few of his successful band). There are a couple of other guys like Swanö in the metal genre, like Peter Tägtgren and mentioned Arjen Lucassen (two musicians he's also worked with at various times) - geniuses that also are jack of all trades and almost always succeed in making whatever they do. Lately, however, I think that Swanö has had a bit of a slump in quality, especially with albums he has produced and not written the music for himself. At Witherscape, Swanö is the leading force behind the band and except for guitarist and bassist Ragnar Widerberg the only member and most of the time it feels like a distinct improvement on most I've heard with the name Swanö lately. Unfortunately it's still not terrificly good.

Earlier I mentioned Dying For The Sun and that is an exception on this album. It's a really good song and has Arjens hilarious futuristic keyboards and playful guitars but most of the other tracks are mostly just slowish grinding to grunting vocals. And that's pretty sad. Swanö has so much knowledge and expertise that he could make the world's greatest albums a hundred times over, if he wanted to. But instead of doing these albums every two years or so like his Dutch colleague he insists on keeping his head down and work super hard, putting his name on a dozen albums in the same period as Arjen makes one and most of it is far too experimental or weird to be really good. On Wikipedia you can count to over 100 different bands / configurations that Swanö has been involved in since the early 90s. Several of these are bands with which he's made more than one album. Quantity before quality... an all too sad expression to say about such an accomplished musician .

'The Inheritance' is, as I said, no exception to how it way too often tends to be when Swanö is involved. One can hear the knowledge, potential and capacity in almost every song on the album… but still there is very little that I take with me from this album and put on my shelf where I collect amazing musical compositions. The album as a whole is okay, good sometimes but also filled with less successful ideas. Often the flow is where the music go wrong. Often the music just stops a tenth or two or the songs are changing tempo 3-4 times per minute and the chorus is almost always something completely different to the verses. And it almost never works. Keyboards and clear vocals are constantly added to the music in the most unexpected (and not seldom inapropriate) places and Swanös muffled vocals feels like it is completely out of outer space and it doesn't feel the least bit exciting.

Yet somehow, I'm not that surprised anymore. It's getting more and more rare that Swanö does continually really good things or even just good things every now and then (not counting guest appearances on other bands albums). 'The Inheritance' might attract the most inveterate fans of Opeth, Meshuggah and that kind of progressive extreme metal bands, but compared to the benchmark of this year in the genre set by Kvelertak, this is at most OK… Such a shame.

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