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Katatonia - Brave Yester Days

Rating

RIYL

Type O Negative
Opeth
Anathema
In Flames

Label

Century Media

Tracklist

Disc: 1
1. Midwinter Gates (Prologue) [Instrumental}
2. Without God
3. Palace of Frost
4. Northern Silence
5. Crimson Tears (Epilogue)
6. Gateways of Bereavement
7. Velvet Thorns (Of Drynwhyl)
8. Black Erotica
9. Love of the Swan
10. Funeral Wedding
11. Shades of Emerald Fields
12. For Funerals to Come
13. Epistel [Instrumental]
Disc: 2
1. Murder
2. Rainroom
3. Nowhere
4. At Last
5. Inside the Fall
6. Untrue
7. Nerve
8. Saw You Drown
9. Quiet World
10. Scarlet Heavens

With this double disc set, you can now own all of Katatonia’s out of print mini cds and rare compilation tracks. For any hardcore Katatonia fan, this is probably a wonderful thing, finally having these songs rounded up and put into one big collection, but looking at this from an average music listener’s perspective, this is definitely a set you should think twice about buying.

I’ve really enjoyed Katatonia’s latest releases. They offered up some great goth-metal goodness with a slight twinge of emo stylings tossed in on the side for good measure. Now I had never heard any of their earlier work, so I approached this double disc set a little tepidly because, more often that not, a band’s early, out of print work is not the same quality as their recent releases. After slogging through the 2+ hours of music presented here, I can easily say that Katatonia made a huge jump in maturation between their early work, contained on these discs, and their latest work.

For the most part, the songs on these two discs sound completely different than Katatonia’s latest cds. In place of their recent mature, goth-metal, you are instead treated to plodding, overly long doom metal and goth, complete with talk of death, sin, and evil barked out in a quasi-demonic growl. Instead of instilling fear in me, like I’m sure they intended to, they instead made songs that almost put me to sleep. With the majority of their songs clocking in at 6 or more minutes long (one even at 13 minutes and another at 9), they drag on and on. This wouldn’t be a problem if there was any type of variety to the song structures, but there isn’t. Every song is the same—slow tempo, brooding guitars, barky vocals, and tons of goth influence. It’s like they took everything that was unique about Type O Negative in the goth genre, threw it out the window, and then tried to craft songs with what was left.

I realize that this is a compilation of Katatonia’s early work, so maybe I shouldn’t expect much, but maybe there is a reason that all of the cds that these songs were compiled from are no longer around—they simply weren’t that good in the first place. On a positive note, there are a couple of songs that are passable. “Shades of Emerald Fields” is probably the best track to be found on either disc, and the reason it is a good track is that it actually incorporates some musical variance. There’s a nice guitar solo, some tempo changes, and a killer mellow section to finish the song off. Now if all of the songs on here were like this, I could easily recommend it, but instead I had a hard time sitting through all of the 2 hours and 10 minutes of this cd. It’s the same thing over and over again, just with different song titles. If you’re a doom metal, goth, or Katatonia fan, you might enjoy these discs, but there are many better discs out there as well that you would be advised to pick up first.

--Rick Gebhardt

Author

Rick Gebhardt

Last updated: 09/29/2009 09:03PM