Katatonia - Nightmares as Extensions of the Wakng State
Katatonia albums are, rightfully, highly anticipated events that provoke endless online debates. This latest release will only foment divisive opinions further. Elementally, Nightmares as Extensions of the Walking State…demonstrates no significant departure from Katatonia’s modern era sound. This band continue to be, even with significant personnel changes, an incontrovertibly stellar group of musicians. The dexterity of musicianship, on record at least, is just beguiling and distils a heady mix of ghostly delicacy, heavy noir intensity, and complex progressive dynamics. The whole interplay is incredibly intelligent and skilled while Katatonia long ago patented a truly unique atmosphere of foreboding modern gothic cerebralism that is impossible to plagiarise.
And yet, despite boasting abundant and multiform talents that could embarrass other bands into retirement, this new record raises more questions than answers. Evidently, over the course of three of four albums, the band have incrementally edged away from their famed sweeping choruses and downbeat, weeping melodies and transitioned into more prog rock convolutions. Nightmares…seems to be the culmination of this development and is their most proggy effort to date. The album is almost bereft totally of big choruses and eschews conventional verse/chorus/verse structures in favour of winding meditations where tracks develop in kind of mini-chapters with multiple bridges and transitions.
It's difficult to pin down where to even start with Nightmares…but the first half of the record could be described as an amalgamation of the heavy serrated tension of The Great Cold Distance and the ostentation of Sky Void of Stars. Standout tracks are most likely Thrice and Lilac which oscillate between agitated heavy riffs and spectral fragility or perhaps the slightly peculiar The Liquid Eye which trades plaintive missives of loss with dreamy prog solos. A bizarre experiment is Wind of no Change, an odd, unsettling face off between heavy, ritualistic creepy marches and late-night urbanism.
Elsewhere the album is restrained and not intended to incite adrenaline. Temporal and Departure Trails and the off-kilter pseudo jazz beats of Warden and The Light Which I Bleed are wistful, hushed contemplations. The lyrics of Jonas Renkse have, over the years, moved from poetic narratives to obtuse streams of consciousness re-telling lonely determinism and soulful loss and that also links in with the stylistic developments. Their softest and lushest song to date is Efter Solen a piano led ghostly pop ballad sung in Swedish that swells and crackles with electronica dance pulses. It sounds like a Katatonia dance remix and is denuded of guitars. It is, however, terrific and what the band have been hinting at for a while and, ironically, has more punch than some of the prog meandering in the rest of the record.
Over the last decade or so, Katatonia have managed a balancing act of showing off a degree of clever clogs ‘musicians’ musicians’ prog sophistication yet keeping a wider set of listeners engaged with their sorrowful, soulful melodies. Potentially, this record could simply go above the heads and disenfranchise some of the latter given the lack of immediacy. Just how well, for instance, would some of these tracks translate to the live stage? True, this album could be a grower and its wider impact may become more evident with committed listens but, for all the intellect on display, there is a risk of this sounding soporific to the masses who prefer their odes to sorrow more obvious.
Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State is released via Napalm Records.