(This is DGR’s review of the first new album by The Duskfall in a dozen years. It was independently released earlier this month.)
There is no such thing as the phrase “did not have that on my bingo card for the year” when said bingo card has effectively been shot to shreds and has existed as confetti since mid-January. While loathe to make predictions for the year outside of trying to will albums into existence by virtue of bringing them up at end-of-year season, a lot of that has basically been a smoking hole in the ground and replaced with a lot of new band and genre explorations in its place.
While we aren’t unfamiliar with bands returning from hibernation at this site – we’ve had a few premieres over the years for groups taking another shot after a decade-plus away – there are times when albums you expected to happen or were even being hinted at just kind of don’t. For whatever reasons, the group will go silent, the assumption being that they’re basically done, so that upcoming album forever exists on a hard drive somewhere but otherwise won’t be seeing the light of day. Eventually the thought just leaves your recollection and a group’s standing catalogue becomes its cenotaph. This was the case with The Duskfall, who it seemed like might have quietly called it a day after five decent-to-great albums.
The Mikael Sandorf-led project had a solid collection to its name, and continual lineup-shifting could’ve proven to be a pain to keep going. Existing in an era in which his previous underrated yet somehow suprisingly well-known group Gates Of Ishtar were reunited, performing live again, and hinting at new material even, can also have the effect of keeping someone busy alongside other metal side projects as well. When you can barely keep track of anything outside of the cycle of “work, home, make sure home doesn’t fall apart” you can somewhat empathize with people who seem to stick to maybe one or two projects.
That is why The Duskfall returning with a new album entitled The Everlasting Shadows wasn’t anywhere on the bingo card; said card didn’t exist, and wow, The Everlasting Shadows had nearly every card stacked against it in favor of dormancy instead.
Since The Duskfall are effectively reaching forward through time into the present, it probably will not surprise anyone to hear that The Everlasting Shadows is of a very classic vein of melodeath – circa late ’90’s, early 2000s. The Duskfall were never a band who lost their way so much as one that remained stubbornly rigid to an overall sound over the course of their more active time period: a heavy focus on harmonized guitar leads, classic two-step riffing, mid-tempo shouts galore, and a rhythm section that exists more for propulsion than any sort of spotlight stealing.
The Duskfall held steady and in the time during their dormancy melodeath was a genre that fell out of favor, stumbled around for identity, saw two or three permutations split off and become their own weird “things”, and then somehow – thirty-year nostalgia cycle in play – saw multiple bands either forming as tributes or re-forming, because we have now reached an era in which the “influenced by the influenced by the influenced by” bands or modern-day popularity are pointing backwards and saying “this is where it started”. Those of us cool kids who were always in the know get to be cool again – or more likely we get to enjoy our collection of sugary-sweet guitar playing and punk-rock and hardcore tempos fusing together into undeniably catchy music. This is the universe into which The Duskfall re-emerge with The Everlasting Shadows, an album that is perfectly fitting for the time because they really don’t make many that sound as modernized “classic” these days as The Everlasting Shadows does.
As decades have passed there have been a few groups who’ve been the standard-bearers for this style of melodeath, keeping their noses to the grindstone even when it seemed like there wasn’t much nose left to grind. The Duskfall held on for a good long while alongside groups like Nightrage and many of the melodeath undercard, and The Everlasting Shadows reflects that. Some of the songs on the album have existed in embryonic form for a long time – you can find demo versions of a few of them posted by the band dating back about four years – and so The Everlasting Shadows is as much an album of time and place as it is something that sounds relatively new. The nine songs that comprise the nearly forty-mnutes of The Everlasting Shadows are about as polished and as shiny as they can be in their current form, and it doesn’t take too long for The Duskfall to remind you why they had their fair share of staying power when that lead guitar work kicks into high gear on opener “Entomb My Shadow”.
The album’s title song song starts out with a pummeling drum section before tearing its way back into the melodeath sphere. The earlier parts of the album as a whole see The Duskfall putting their guitar players to work through either machine-gun heavy riffing or pleasant surprises like the quieter clean guitar section that appears in the lead up to the chorus segments of “The Everlasting Shadows”. Tag teamed with a piano line for the main melody, and that segment alone is going to be incredibly difficult to free from your skull after a few listens.
Elsewhere in The Everlasting Shadows you do have your first swaying mid-tempo stomp in “Legion”, which again benefits from a lot of melodic work to help free it from being a momentum breaker for the sake of dynamics. It is punchy, but also it has to be noted that there is definitely a faint “hey! hey!” bit of atmospherics across the whole song. “Legion” is tailor-made for crowd participation and arrives after a surgical four song-assault in the beginning of the album.
The album’s second half has a bit of a morbid obsession with the ground, given that both songs following “Legion” mention the grave in some form. “Night At The Graves” has the classic forward unto apocalyptic battle songwriting style that has gotten many a viking-themed group onto festival stages over the years, and “Kneedeep In The Grave” follows in similar tact, though the song is much bouncier when it comes down to its main rhythm section.
“Golem”, as the other one-word song title and also the other fairly mid-tempo cresting of the melodeath wave on The Everlasting Shadows, is fun for stastistics reasons but gets unfortunately caught in a strong shadow of the songs both preceeding it and the one directly following it – though you could argue that as climactic as “The Peacemaker” should be, The Duskfall taking different paths and just hammering out something relentlessly fast and noisy in comparison to the polish of the rest of The Everlasting Shadows is a fun twist. Why not send the album out on a two and a half minute song that is basically grindcore by comparison to the album’s slower numbers? If The Haunted can do it every once in a while then The Duskfall should at least be allowed to close an album out with it. “The Peacemaker” is so restless as a song that it colors how much of that initial The Everlasting Shadows impression might last.
Sometimes it can be just as exciting to see a band back as it is to see a new album from them. The Duskfall were always such a steady undercurrent to the melodeath scene that it never felt like they would fall silent, but over the decade-plus between releases – though the band were still somewhat active in teasing this very album – it just seemed like The Duskfall, through all its trials and tribulations, may have just decided to be shelved. There was never really a chance to miss them because they never had that huge culture-shifting, standout release. Theywere a band that were really goddamned good at what they did, and that opening three-pack from their career is hard to deny.
That’s what makes an album like The Everlasting Shadows such a surprise, because The Duskfall had to overcome a lot to get here and yet the songs sound just as vital as ever. The Everlasting Shadows is a melodeath album that sounds like it belongs to the modern scene just as much as it does a classic era of guitar-lead worshipping melodeath. When you have over half an album easily qualifying as highlight songs and a fun-as-all-hell closer like The Everlasting Shadows does, you know you have something great on your hands.
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