Candlemass - Epic Nocturnal Metal

Bassist Leif Edling was part of Nemesis, but when that band split up, he founded his own group, Candlemass, together with singer Johan Längqvist, drummer Matz Ekström and guitarists Mats "Mappe" Björkman and Klas Bergwall. Within a few months - by 1985, in fact - the first songs and the first demo arrived, even though there was no permanent singer in place. Johan Längqvist filled in as best he could, which led to the opportunity to record a proper debut in 1986.

Released just before summer, Epicus Doomicus Metallicus is actually their coldest and most funereal album, steeped in a solemn, depressive grandeur. While the mainstream path of contemporary heavy metal was to play faster, louder and more savage, Candlemass chose to set themselves apart with long, lumbering, viscous songs, sung with operatic, baritone inflections. Rather than drawing on Cold War anxieties, the horrors of human violence, or the most repellent gore, the Swedes wrote a six-song rosary in which not a single ray of light filters through, dealing with an intimate, deep, inescapable malaise.

The opening track, "Solitude", is the ideal manifesto of their approach to music: a suicide note, delivered through a majestic, stentorian, elegant nocturnal heavy metal. "Solitude" is so paradigmatic of their entire career that it has never once been left out of a single Candlemass show: the first chapter of the band's story is, essentially, an exploration of the mindset of a would-be suicide. What's harder to grasp, though, is how the band conveys the relationship between suffering and extreme self-destruction. Though tormented in its morbid, funereal, warped melodies, and though remaining largely suffocating and bleak overall, this epic doom metal - as the mock-Latin title trivially puts it - channels the ambiguous sensuality of death, its liberating, soothing undertone. We are, then, in an entirely different world from the ultra-violent death - perhaps via machine gun or nuclear bomb - imagined and turned into albums by other equally brutal musicians of the era.

The dominant colour of Epicus Doomicus Metallicus isn't the exaggeratedly bright red of splatter cinema, nor the slightly more burnished tone of the "Théâtre du Grand-Guignol", but shades of grey, black and sepia. In its emotional palette, violence is merely a vehicle, never the protagonist or the end goal, while melancholy, disappointment, nostalgia and apathy are far more decisive, central and dominant forces. The other five tracks explore the same tragic emotional state, occasionally flirting with a bit of speed/thrash metal ("Demons Gate"), a particularly exuberant solo ("Crystal Ball", which features a textbook slam-dance moment), or the kind of sectional, compositional structure typical of prog rock ("Black Stone Wielder", "Under The Oak"). The lengthy "A Sorcerer's Pledge" attempts, across its 8 minutes, to bring all these variations together into something like an ideal compendium, even featuring a thriller-style keyboard passage.

Initially the public's response is lukewarm, to the point that the small label "Black Dragon" terminates the contract, discouraged by the rather modest sales. Needless to say, this debut will in time come to be regarded as a milestone of the genre and reissued on multiple occasions, complete with collector's editions, testifying to its status as a cult object. Bands like My Dying Bride, Cathedral and Paradise Lost will often look to these six tracks for inspiration.

Hardly discouraged by the unsatisfying commercial response, and now reorganized with Eddie "Messiah" Marcolin on vocals replacing Johan Längqvist, and armed with a new contract with the label "Axis", Candlemass return at the end of 1987 with Nightfall. Other changes, though less significant than the change of singer, have also been made to the line-up: Jan Lindh is the new drummer and Lars Johansson joins on guitars. Marcolin, however, is the proverbial missing piece of the puzzle, turning this second album into their gothic masterpiece. His operatic baritone is the ideal voice for a slow, lugubrious heavy metal, both majestic and heavy. His influence also leads the band to include, in the track listing, a reworking of Chopin's funeral march, in the name of a refinement that's easier to perceive on Nightfall than on Epicus Doomicus Metallicus.

Greeted with enthusiasm by the specialist press and the public, the album is seen as a synthesis of the proto-doom heavy metal of Black Sabbath and the new era inaugurated by Metallica with their first, exceptional albums. Divided into ten tracks, four of which are brief instrumentals, it's a sort of refined version of the debut and continues to develop mainly through long, tormented compositions.

Opened by the gothic-operatic explosion of "Gothic Stone", the album finds in "The Well Of Souls" its new compositional model, likewise gothic, epic and suffocating. Tracks such as "Codex Gigas", "At The Gallows End" and "Samarithan" reaffirm the idea that Candlemass are an extremization of Black Sabbath, especially the Black Sabbath fascinated by the progressive leanings of "Masters Of Reality", viewed through a much more pronounced gothic-decadent sensibility. More muddled is the operatic thrash-metal of "Dark Are The Veils Of Death", a compromise with the metal more in vogue at the time. Back on track with a classic epic-doom-metal piece like "Bewitched", the Swedes close out the record by reaffirming their stable position on the throne of the style they themselves christened.

Ancient Dreams (1988), on the other hand, is a third album that amounts to a confirmation, and little more. The lineup from Nightfall returns and plays the same epic-doom-metal for which it was praised by fans, pushing the spectacular side of its sound even further. Marcolin in particular often verges on the most exalted histrionics, drawing comparisons to Bruce Dickinson and Rob Halford, and overall the band leans more heavily on solos ("A Cry From The Crypt", "Darkness In Paradise", "Ancient Dreams"), deafening volumes and speed-thrash outbursts ("The Bells Of Acheron").

With "Mirror Mirror" added to their catalogue of classics, little else holds up against the first two albums. The more decadent side of their music around despair returns in "Epistle No. 81". The compact-disc edition even features a Black Sabbath medley, a fitting tribute but also a typical way of padding things out.

The third record, which reaches number 45 on the Swedish album chart, allows the band to also make an appearance on the equivalent American chart.

The fourth LP, Tales Of Creation (1989), already attempts to recapture the sound of their early days, with "Dark Reflections", "Into The Unfathomed Tower" (an entirely instrumental speed-metal track!), "Somewhere In Nowhere" and "A Tale Of Creation", which are reworkings of older songs. "Under The Oak" is simply the track from the debut, re-recorded with Marcolin. With shorter songs that still don't shy away from the more spectacular moments, Candlemass bring to a close what amounts to an ideal tetralogy in which they outlined their own particular way of making heavy metal.

It's no small detail that Marcolin himself, the man who helped crystallize their epic doom into a recognizable format, would not take part in the band's work again for a full 15 years; in 1991, following a long tour also documented on Live (1990), he leaves the band.

The others don't last much longer. They release Chapter VI (1992), with Thomas Vikström on vocals, but the commercial results are modest and shortly after the band decides to split up. The fact that Edling had also started a side project, called Abstrakt Algebra, reveals the band's need to break out of the substantial monotony in which it had become trapped.

Even considering the album as belonging to the band's history in name only, Chapter VI comes away labelled as a heavy metal record that mixes doom with the English school, without holding up against the drive toward contamination and extremization found in many contemporary bands: it's a work that belongs more to the '80s than the '90s.

On the EP Sjunger Sigge Fürst they even sound outright silly, in a parody of pop-rock that frankly undermines all their credibility.

This marks the end of the first era in the long career of the Swedish band. With Edling busy elsewhere, a highly charismatic singer gone from the lineup and few new ideas left to develop, after 5 studio albums and a live document, and after years of grueling touring, Candlemass seem to have reached the end of the road: the would-be suicide of "Solitude" finally meets the long-contemplated death. At least, everything would seem to suggest that the end has come, but fate is unpredictable, and what looks like a tombstone turns out to be simply a long pause.

Chapter II: Abstract Algebra and Space Travel

As the black god arises from the cold of the lake

Figure of smoke, emerald head

Magnificent is the king of the dead

(from “Tot”)

Disappointed with his new project, the bassist and Candlemass leader decides to reuse some tracks originally intended for Abstrakt Algebra in order to reform the band. After all, it's the label, Music For Nations, asking him to cash in on the cult name's pull, and the continuity with the past is underlined even by the cover art, which clearly references the debut, with its skull pierced by a cross.

The record is, in short, ill-conceived: begun with Abstrakt Algebra's progressive sound, it was reshaped to fit the epic doom-metal sound of Candlemass. What's more, far too many musicians take part in the recording sessions, which stretch out over a full 18 months of work. The result is a hybrid of the classic sound (“I Still See The Black”, “Karthago”), stoner-rock (“Wiz”), and the most hallucinated space-rock (“Dustflow”, “Abstrakt Sun”).

Dactylis Glomerata (1998) is therefore a sort of apocryphal sixth album. Unlike its predecessor, it's firmly rooted in its era, particularly in that moment of self-reflection that heavy metal underwent at the turn of the millennium: part tradition, part contamination, a bit alternative and a bit trendy. The band is clearly at ease with the anguished miasmas favoured by the new generation, which they interpret effectively on the tense “Apathy”, and on the nocturnal, jazzy “Thirst”.

Closing out the millennium comes From The 13th Sun ('99), an album dedicated to Black Sabbath, whom the Swedes consider “the greatest band of all time”. Unsurprisingly, it's a return to roots and, if anything, a recovery of blues-rock fascinations that had never before been made so explicit, now emerging after the stoner-rock detour of the previous album. Even more than the debut, this is an album that closely studies the early, memorable work of Ozzy Osbourne and co. “Tot”, to cite one representative track among many, replicates “Black Sabbath” itself almost to the point of mere imitation, with the same bells and the same dynamics. Modernity only creeps in through the fat, earth-shaking sound that occasionally pummels the drums, for instance on “Elephant Star” which, in essence, is a reworking of “Symptom Of The Universe”.

Having reached a new moment of stasis, the Swedes take stock of this second chapter of their career with Doomed For Live – Reunion 2002 (2003), with Messiah Marcolin back on vocals. It's a parade of classics that reaffirms the band's legacy, but which nonetheless once again suggests their career might be nearing its end. Once more, though, death fascinates the band without claiming them. Edling in the meantime busies himself with Krux, while much of the catalogue is reissued in remastered form. The reunited band struggles to deliver a new album, a worthy successor to Tales From Creation, and indeed ends up bickering. For two years, Candlemass cease to exist.

Chapter III: Death, Magic and Legend