It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since getting my first taste of Beseech ’s Drama, an album that is still in my CD case in my car and still gets routine spins. The album’s combination of groovy hooks, thick production and the pairing of male/female vocalists Erik Molarin and Lotta Hoglin were enough to make this Swedish band stand out from the rest of the gothic metal groups vying for a name for themselves.
Given my high regard for their last album (indeed, were I to rate it today, I’d probably throw on another half-a-star), their latest, Sunless Days, came with perhaps more expectation than it should have. Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite lived up to them.
That said it’s still a solid album. Bandleader Robert Vintervind still knows how to write a catchy, goth-tinged song, Molarin and Hoglin are still above average vocalists and overall the whole band is still a very solid unit.
So, what’s wrong? First of all, a lot of the groove evident on Drama seems to be missing. With that album, each song had its own unique identity, whether it be “Drama” and its piano driven melancholy, “Higher Level” and Molarin’s deep voice or “Bitch” and Hoglin’s come-hither delivery. There’s nothing that particularly stands out as being “that’s exactly what was in the last song,” but some of the uniqueness that made their last album so refreshingly different seems to have been lost.
All this is over a relatively short album. Sure, it’s a few minutes longer than Drama, but when you take out a rather unnecessary cover (“Devil’s Plaything”) and half of a piano/vocal duet that’s about 3-minutes too long (“Lost”), the disc is over before you’ve had time to even notice Manne Engsttrom’s the new second guitarist.
I still can recommend this album because it is, after all my nitpicking, a quality listen. It’s also, however, a prime example of what can happen when one album sets the bar way too high for successive releases to match it. It’s not that Sunless Days is that bad, it’s that Drama was that good.
