Teargas EP
Recorded at Sunlight Studio, April-November of 2000. Mastered/edited at The Cutting Room in Stockholm. Released February 2001 on Peaceville Records.
Tracklist:1. Teargas - 3:23
2. Sulfur - 6:21
3. March 4 - 3:50
Total Track Time - 13:34
Lineup:Jonas Renkse - vocals, lyrics
Anders Nystrom - guitars, Mellotron, songwriting
Daniel Liljekvist - drums
Fredrik Norrman - electric & acoustic guitars
Mattias Norrman - bass
Tomas Skogsberg - producer/engineering/mixing
Jocke Pettersson - producer/engineering/mixing
Peter In de Betou - mastering/editing
*This was intended to be a promotional single to tide people over before the next album came out, but they added two bonus tracks to it.
*"March 4" is appended as "38047" on some streaming services.
*I'll save comments about their sound at this point for the main album.
Last Fair Deal Gone Down
Recorded at Sunlight Studio, April-November of 2000. Mastered/edited at The Cutting Room in Stockholm. Released May 2001 on Peaceville Records.
Tracklist:1. Dispossession - 5:36
2. Chrome - 5:14
3. We Must Bury You - 2:50
4. Teargas - 3:23
5. I Transpire - 5:56
6. Tonight's Music - 4:20
7. Clean Today - 4:23
8. The Future of Speech - 5:40
9. Passing Bird - 3:38
10. Sweet Nurse - 3:57
11. Don't Tell a Soul - 5:42
Total Track Time - 50:39
Lineup:Jonas Renkse - lead and backing vocals, lyrics, songwriting
Anders Nystrom - rhythm and lead guitars, keyboards and Mellotron, songwriting
Daniel Liljekvist - drums
Fredrik Norrman - rhythm, lead and acoustic guitars, songwriting
Mattias Norrman - bass
Tomas Skogsberg - producer/engineering/mixing
Jocke Pettersson - producer/engineering/mixing
Peter In de Betou - mastering/editing
*Man have I been looking foward to this one. This was their newest album when I started getting into them. Normally I've been waiting a few days after the previous album to start listening to the next one, not this time, I had to put it on the next day.
*Travis Smith handled the artwork again for this one. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I found out a few years later that it reminds me of some of the covers from Swedish dark ambient artist raison d'etre. Look up
Conspectus and
Within the Depths of Silence and Phormations if you're curious.
*The title is named after a song by Robert Johnson, the blues guitarist. You know all the folklore about the deal with the devil for talent made at the crossroads and all that lore? Yeah, that guy.
*They suffered more from writer's block in this period than they had before. More time was spent editing and redoing parts than in the past. They also struggled to find the finances to record the whole album at once, so they had to do it in smaller increments over a number of months. This led to some tension and stress among them. For some reason that tends to produce better art from what I've observed. They also wanted to give each individual song more of a distinctive personality, feeling that some of their earlier albums had too many songs that were similar to each other.
*The tuning is starting to drop now. The last three albums had all been a half-step down in Eb standard, but now they've lowered to drop-Db for some of the songs. Anders mentions experimenting with tunings in this period, so there might be others as well, but that one is quite obvious to me.
*Instantly the drumming is by far the best it's been, you should be able to tell even just from the first track. The grooves are more propulsive, and yet much more detailed and intricate. Ghost notes, all the double strokes, flam and triplet fills, and the crash riding add a lot of nuance and energy. This is still just a taste of what's to come, but this is building his resume as probably one of my top 5 drummers. The ride and bell pattern opening "Clean Today" is just so tasty. I love the tom groove in the verse of "Don't Tell a Soul", it's fairly simple, but quite effective.
*They also talk about having Daniel as really freeing them to start increasing the complexity of their rhythms and arrangements. They didn't have a rehearsal space, so the first time he was able to play the songs with them was when they began tracking the album, and he had to borrow an old worn pair of drumsticks from Jonas because he didn't have money to buy new ones. He recorded the whole album on just that one pair of sticks, and since the studio wasn't set up for punch-ins, any time he made a mistake, he had to redo the whole song.
*For a long time "Clean Today" was my favorite track from the first five albums, until "Gone" from DO overtook it maybe half a decade ago. The verse of "Clean Today" is a simplified version of some patterns they would utilize a lot more later on, starting to add a bit of Tool influence to their sound with the toms and muted guitar patterns. It's not as obvious as it would be later, but they specifically cite
Aenima as an influence on their sound in this period, as well as A Perfect Circle. They also reference Ben Christophers and Tori Amos as influences for them at the time.
*Some really fantastic clean tones here, especially on "Dispossession" and "We Must Bury You". I like how "Sweet Nurse" has completely different effects going on for each guitar track, making them unique and distinct. Around 2:45 is another variation of those signature Nystrom licks, leaning heavily on the tritone.
*Jonas is starting to come into his own as a vocalist. Still not his best performance, but the audible uneasiness and discomfort is really starting to dissipate. These are also much more memorable melodies to me. These tracks differentiated themselves from each other much more quickly than their earlier albums to me.
*This is where they start experimenting just a bit with electronics. The verses of "Chrome", "Tonight's Music", and "We Must Bury You" especially. I'm kind of surprised they didn't try and *ahem* bury the latter one late in the album, I know it was a controversial tune when it came out. But again, this was still the era where all these former death, doom, black, and gothic metal bands were experimenting with the flavors of the day, and various electronic textures were a common sandbox those bands played in at this point. Liljekvist wasn't available to record at the time Anders wrote that track, so they tried recording it on a drum machine without him, and kept the result.
*Mattias' bass playing is an improvement over Fredrik's and Anders'. Less unvaried root notes following the power chords and more fills and pickup notes. They're actually really sounding like a band with distinct individual members to me now, except that it's not always clear which guitar parts are Anders and which are Frederik.
*I'd kind of forgotten how omnipresent the keyboards are here. They're less prominent than they would become later on, but they're frequently sitting back in the mix, filling the sound out, peaking out occasionally when the rest of the instruments are quieter.
*For longer than I want to admit I couldn't remember which of "Tonight's Decision" and "Tonight's Music" was the album and which was the song.
*The Mellotron strings in "The Future of Speech" are probably the most beautiful thing on the album.
*"Passing Bird" was one of my early favorites. For some reason this wound up being a song that I listened to a number of times earlier on while shopping at Costco, and it made that drudgery more bearable. This song at this point is probably more famous for Jonas mispronouncing "emo" though.
*I'm still torn about when "the Katatonia sound" really begins. It's probably here, because this is the genesis of the most stable lineup they would have in their career, and Jonas is a more capable vocalist than on the first few albums. However, it's still streamlined compared to their later work, and the keyboards are still mostly in the background. And probably more important for me than most other people, they haven't yet settled into what I consider their signature tuning, which we'll get to in the next couple albums.
*Lethean can talk more about the lyrics if he wants, but I know Jonas talks about starting to write more fictional stories rather than just personal introspection, "We Must Bury You" (based on a news story he read) and "Sweet Nurse" being particular examples.
*Like a lot of lower and even mid-tier bands, playing this sort of music isn't very profitable, so Jonas and Anders in particular had to work by day at the post office and then at night in the studio working on the album, which is one of numerous reasons it took longer to record.
*They did small tours with Paradise Lost and then with Opeth before the album was released. Particularly on the Paradise Lost tour, they had to sometimes sleep in the tiny, cramped van, noticing that Paradise Lost's was much larger and comfortable, outfitted with gaming consoles and such. At the time it was a coin flip as to who was more popular between Opeth and Katatonia, but Katatonia let Opeth headline the gigs. After the album they toured with Akercocke and Gandalf, and then again with Opeth (who had just released
Blackwater Park by that point), and Novembre. Jonas Kjellgren from Scar Symmetry and others did front of house sound for some of their gigs at the time.
Tonight's Music single
Tracklist:1. Tonight's Music - 4:20
2. Help Me Disappear - 5:13
3. Oh How I Enjoy the Light - 2:44
Total Track Time - 12:17
*"Oh How I Enjoy the Light" is a cover of a tune from the band Palace.
Lineup:Jonas Renkse - vocals, lyrics
Anders Nystrom - guitars, keyboards, songwriting
Daniel Liljekvist - drums
Fredrik Norrman - guitars
Mattias Norrman - bass
*The second two tracks were produced by Katatonia and recorded at Black Lounge Studio.
*I don't like the production as much on those two tracks, it sounds thinner and more brittle to me.
*There's another variation of that Nystrom riff at 3:30 and a few other spots in "Help Them Disappear".
*If you thought Jonas' clean vocals were rough on
Discouraged Ones, you should hear the original of "Oh How I Enjoy the Light", Jonas sounds like Dio in comparison to me. But maybe they're so far in the "earnest amateur authenticity" direction that they appeal to indie folk types, I don't know, I always struggled with the lo-fi, slacker sound.
*
Favorite Tracks - "Clean Today", "Dispossession", "Help Me Disappear", "The Future of Speech"
Topic: Katatonia Discography Discussion: Sky Void of Stars (2023) (Read 22632 times)
