Artist: Tiamat
Title: The Scarred People
Genre: Gothic Rock
Release Date: 2nd November 2012
Label: Napalm Records
Album Review
Being a keen admirer of the masterpiece called ‘Wildhoney’, I lost track of TIAMAT releases for years. So with the 10th album, ‘The Scarred People’, I am rediscovering the band. 18 years past, band ended up fully classic Goth, according to Wikipedia. The word Goth is repeated then in every review I checked out. It's either begin true to "facts" stated in genre designation, or will to put a nice band and a favourite genre together. It would be quite nostalgic to rediscover dark ambience of ‘Wildhoney’, but what is left here from these times is mostly a rhythm and overall flow of music - familiarly slow, melodic, with reverberated vocals mixed deep into overall sound. And I do not hear too much Goth, you know, that sort 69 EYES style stuff. Somewhere, but not everywhere.
Perhaps the most gothic is the first song, ‘The Scarred People’. It is 100% Goth, a speedy, dark song. It even got a chorus about roses and darkness for the good measure. But next composition, ‘Winter Dawn’, is more of hard-rock, and made of a patchwork of several parts. And this "tuning into style" ends up with slow, monotonically rhythmic ‘384 - Kteis’, that contains references to Shiva, a destructive Hindu god. Since this song the slow, balanced rhythm start dominating the tracks, as it continues to ‘Radiant Star’ and ‘The Sun also Rises’. The lyrics from the songs refer to some occult encounters, life philosophy, women, but the texts are too unspecific to make up full picture in all cases. Either Mr. Edlund wanted listener to dig deeper to find all the meanings or just made a call that faithful listener would fill these words with his own sense. I am by all means not a poetic critic to offer an unbiased view, but for me, lyrics was rather unspecific. If I accidentally have some persona reminiscences, it will resonate for me, otherwise not.
Further on, the album becomes much more classic rock. Beautiful first chords of ‘Love Terrorists' is a direct homage to ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’. The following ‘Messinian Letter’ carries again reminiscent to the style in which ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ was written, again, classic 70s composition, and the association continues further in the lyrics of the song. The album closes with a rather Goth rock ‘Thunder & Lightning’. There are several bonus tracks, appearing in various editions, apparently. There is TIAMAT-ish slow and melodic ‘The Red of the Morining Sun’. Other two songs are covers: Lana del Rey's ‘Born to Die’ and beautiful Bruce Springsteen's ‘Paradise’. First one is a rock song and did not stand out to me. The second one is a darkened yet acoustic version of the original, and I found it more interesting and very nicely done reprise. Would be very good for some closing titles for a post-apocalyptic movie. Finally, German Amazon version got ‘Divided’ and ‘Cain’ on the track list as well, apparently not a new songs.
The album is solid, but not outstanding. Recommended for people who like to dig into nuances of music and lyrics.
Tracklist
01. The Scarred People
02. Winter Dawn
03. 384 – Kteis
04. Radiant Star
05. The Sun Also Rises
06. Before Another Wilbury Dies
07. Love Terrorists
08. Messinian Letter
09. Thunder & Lightning
10. Tiznit
11. Born To Die (Bonus Track)
12. The Red of the Morning Sun
13. Paradise (Bonus Track)
14. Divided (Live) (Bonus Track)
15. Cain (Live) (Bonus Track)
Line-up
Johan Edlund
Anders Iwers
Lars Sköld
Website
http://www.myspace.com/tiamat
Cover
Rating
Music: 6
Sound: 6
Total: 6 / 10
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