Still At Arms Length

The Provenance means place or source of origin. So the provenance of this band is Gotenburg, Sweden. This city is Scandinavia's largest port with an architectural blend of well-preserved old districts and exciting new areas, such as the redeveloped shipyards. Gotenburg is in the center of Scandinavia, equidistant from Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. The city is known for its friendly atmosphere with plenty of cafés, restaurants which serve local seafood, and pubs which are interspersed with wide avenues and beautiful parks and gardens. But this city is also well known for its local metal scene since numbers of Swedish death metal bands helped creating the “Gotenburg sound”.

Imagine now a young band thinking of blending Swedish symphonic rock and English doom, along with keyboards and flute and female vocals. with the Gotenburg sound. What you’ve got then in 2001 is an interesting first album called 25th Hour; Bleeding where the band’s will to experiment created a majestic blend of sophisticated harmonies and pure head-banging sequences on this heavy, passionate, introspective, technical and original piece of work. They managed to accentuate all five members in ways seldom heard and this is an album showing the provenance of something great. Now, less than a couple of years later comes their second full length, Still At Arms Length on Scarlet Records again. The band has gained a lot in maturity and they have managed to develop their sound and their musical orientation a little further. The band’s influences are very obvious as on their first album. Touches from Anathema and My Dying Bride as for English doom and some early The Gathering (era Anneke of course) and soft Opeth influences along with some light In Flames or even Dark Tranquility as for the Gotenburg sound. But the band went a little further with the experimentation and tends to become very atmospheric and progressive at times, especially due to the fragile haunting and desperate female voice of Emma Hellström and her soft flute and piano and keyboard parts. Tobias Martinsson’s male vocals are getting sometimes clearer than on their previous effort and complements Emma’s voice better, but he also remains deathish when he has to. The band also added some more nice folk influences into their music which helps develop their music into new territories more progressive than on their first album.

All in all this is a second album that is far more interesting than their previous one. As we did not review their first album, there will be no comparison of quotation, but I urge all those who bought their first effort and liked it to go get this one. I would really love to see this guys (and girl) on stage as their music is really interesting.