Dismember

One of the early Swedish death metal bands, Dismember arose from the ashes of Carnage and moved on to create their own powerful, unique style of simple thundering death metal.

Dismember - Like an Ever-Flowing Stream... (1991)
Dismember - Pieces (1993)
Dismember - Misanthropic (1997)

Like an Ever-Flowing Stream...

Nuclear Blast

1991

Production: Not clear but representative enough, with enough bottom end and percussive clarity to make it effective. This contains the signature "Swedish guitar sound" of short-circuited disharmonious distortion that Entombed, Carnage, and Dismember made famous.

Review: Swedish death metal became famous for its phrases of destruction interrupted by thunderous recursion, ripping themselves apart in unfolding conclusion, alternated with racing formations of fast-strummed chords flowing liquid and rhythmic like the energies that replenish life and bring the sudden violence of death.

Dismember accentuate these qualities and build simple pieces into epics through emphasis on the release from order to deconstruction, layering driftlike afterimage guitars on the obscure fast and simple riffs blasted out in syncopation with a riveted structure of vibrations supporting the entire expression in a simultaneous chain of organic events in precision correspondence to a greater event. Songs are usually a permutation of a verse-chorus infrastructure, broken into subsections and riff-salad variants to avoid the simple ratcheting loop of that contrast, held together in the basic rhythm of the drums while guitars synchronize their rhythms closer to the brutal beating that death deserves.

Tracklist:

1. Override Of The Overture (5:15)
2. Soon To Be Dead (1:55)
3. Bleed For Me (3:20)
4. And So Is Life (3:11)
5. Dismembered (5:54)
6. Skin Her Alive (2:15)
7. Sickening Art (3:56)
8. In Death's Sleep (5:21)
9. Deathevocation (4:47)
10. Defective decay (4:04)
Length: 40:00

Dismember - Like an Ever-Flowing Stream... - Swedish Death Metal 1991 Nuclear Blast

Vast openings peel away levels of song and reduce simple concepts to epic importance, having ritual placement within the essence of a song. The composition of each riff takes the stream of logic that power chords provide and breaks it into rhythmic components of demise, each taking the scale apart or blasting it out in a rhythm to bend its shape: conformity of the basic to a larger and aesthetically different idea, a rearrangement toward an apocalypse where the patterns of life with be dissassembled in destruction and then the pieces recontextualized with new functions in a darker universe.

Differences in tonal motion within the chords are purely a matter of relative direction, the vectors of the syncopated motion of life put into similar patterns in energetic, vitalizing, aggressive music of survival in a postapocalyptic herd. In grim championship of destruction Dismember delight in switching their rhythms from simple walk-beats supporting informative ragged chants of verse to blasting racetrack demonisms and then closing on a blast; solos are sometimes scissoring streams of chords overlaid in somewhat chaotic arrangements creating simple melody in the mysterious harmony and yet wistful dissonance, drifting into a potential-less twist of a note, gesturing toward a direction unfound before the closure of despair.

Emerging from the past toward a future of potential design this music is a hybrid of heavy metal angst and death metal practicality and emotion, forming from explosively collisive chord structures an inner beauty and sonority through the harmonizing affinity of distorted sound shaped into melody. As a result, this music has in itself an elusive passage of transcendence in which it is forever from the mud reaching toward the stars.

1. Intro
2. Pieces
3. I wish you Hell
4. Carnal Tomb
5. Soon to be dead
6. Torn apart

Pieces (Nuclear Blast, 1993)
In the thunderous style of the electric nerve energy that is Swedish death metal this release attacks, but the stance which displays too much consciousness of form for the truly chaotic bursts of structure that defined the exuberance and morbid passion which characterized early works from this band has seized hold of its spirit. These songs are solid and full of the roaring devices that made Dismember great, but there is also too much desire to please, too much awareness of audience, and a sensation of solidity and uniformity underneath the healthy pace of blast. Searing buzz-distorted riffs hammer through patterns which recombine to reveal the great triumph of Swedish metal engineering, the neo-epic and anthemically emotive bridge to a return chorus and verse before conclusion. Simple pop songs and complex barrages of classically-inspired melodic riffing unite and are cemented in the abrupt rhythms and configurations of riffs that distinguish this subgenre. While this work is not as strong as that on "Like an Everflowing Stream..." it is nonetheless demonstrates more impressive musicianship and refinement to simplicity and regularity in song.

1. Misanthropic
2. Pagan Savior
3. Shadowlands
4. Afterimage
5. Shapeshifter

Misanthropic (Nuclear Blast, 1997)
Promising a "return to our roots," Dismember after ruminant meditation on the stagnant response to their last several undistinguished albums have unleashed their original style of melodic death metal - except they haven't, and furthermore have shown the bankruptcy of their claim through the tendencies of this current release to show a careful study and imitation of popular concepts in heavy music. Too many music lessons and ideological apathy in integration to the music-selling system of their world have worn Dismember away from the lawless, free, and although-basic fundamental beauty of their debut, "Like An Ever-Flowing Stream." Now instead of violent structuralism and rhythmic centering Dismember use scale-centric composition to make a more commercial, violent but well-trained version of the death metal that mainstream "angry" audiences would love.