Yesterworlds

The 2009 release of Yesterworlds: The Early Demos commemorates the 20th anniversary of Dark Tranquillity's impressive career (18th if you discount the first two, when they went by the rather comical moniker of Septic Broiler!), and their almost incomparably consistent body of work, not only in terms of quality but also in their largely unwavering commitment to melodic death metal. Ironically, early on in their career before they came to epitomize the very face of the so-called Gothenburg sound, the group was somewhat overshadowed by both more accessible, more extreme, or simply better-marketed Swedish compatriots like Entombed, Edge of Sanity, Tiamat, and others, making this newly reissued material all the more compelling for reappraisal with the benefit of hindsight. This is especially so for the three songs from 1991's Trail of Life Decayed demo (including fan favorite "Beyond Enlightenment"), which juggled different riffs as though their lives depended on it, clearly prized showboating complexity over songwriting immediacy, and featured the exact same growling but hollow guitar tone heard on the earliest releases by the bands cited above. Even the subsequent tandem of seven-minute slogs drawn from 1992's A Moonclad Reflection EP revealed only the slightest glimpses of the overt melodicism, songwriting economy -- never mind the keyboards -- that would figure so prominently on DT's future, most representative work. But the seeds were certainly sown here, and the presence of original vocalist Anders Friden on all of the above is notable merely because of his well-documented defection to cross-town rivals In Flames (with whom he remains to the present day), because his tuneless screaming was otherwise as undeveloped and unrecognizable from later-day performances as the musicianship of his erstwhile bandmates. The remaining four songs collected on Yesterworlds are essentially 1994 demos for Dark Tranquillity's imminent The Gallery album and Of Chaos and Eternal Night EP, and thus somewhat less illuminating from a rarities standpoint, but they do shed a little light on the band's first collaborations with second vocalist, Mikael Stanne, who would quickly make fans forget his predecessor and who continues at the helm two decades on. So the only question left to ask about Yesterworlds is whether it serves much of a purpose, since most of the die-hard fans likely to care about such obscurities probably already acquired them back in the day, in one shape or another. But the answer to that question is most certainly a yes, given Dark Tranquillity's escalating popularity over recent years, and the volume of new fans who gravitated to and contributed to that popularity. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia