«Dance of December Souls» is the first Katatonia album. It came out on 14 December 1993 through No Fashion and was recorded between 4 and 9 April 1993 at Unisound Studios, with Dan Swanö producing together with the band. The line-up on the record is Jonas Renkse on vocals and drums, Anders Nyström on guitars and Guillaume Le Huche on bass, with Dan Swanö on keyboards.
“`Country: Sweden
Genre: Doom Metal
For fans of: My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, Anathema
The record mixes doom with death and black metal elements — the same ground diSEMBOWELMENT were covering on «Transcendence into the Peripheral» that same year: slow, heavy songs, with vocals that move between a rasp and clean singing.
It runs for 53 minutes over eight tracks. «Gateways of Bereavement», «Without God» and the thirteen-minute «Velvet Thorns (of Drynwhyl)» stand out, and that last one shows how far the band was willing to stretch a single piece.
Katatonia were formed in Stockholm in the early 1990s, and «Dance of December Souls» was their first full-length, after the 1992 EP «Jhva Elohim Meth… The Revival».
It is also the first album with Guillaume Le Huche on bass; before him Anders Nyström played both guitar and bass. The keyboards and the extra vocals belong to Dan Swanö.
Black Lodge reissued it in 2004 with a new cover that the band did not recognise, and Peaceville followed in 2007 with an edition that carried the tracks from that first EP.
This is where Katatonia begin: a few years later they left the heavy sound behind for a more melancholic, clean style, far from the doom ground that Candlemass opened with «Epicus Doomicus Metallicus».
Dan Swanö’s production gave the songs a clear but heavy sound, tying the doom riffs to the keyboards and the clean vocals. The songs are long and slow, and nothing is in a hurry.
See also
See also: Mother of Millions – T and Mother of Graves – The Light That Keeps Us.
