Carnage

Dark Recollections (1990)

Carnage helped pioneer the booming, bass-heavy, anti-Punk sound of Swedish Death Metal (replete with thrash beats and hardcore overtones). But moreso than their contemporaries they developed the format into something that could be also packaged with melody, rather than just crushing riffs and headbanging monotony. Their approach was often blunt and forthright, always stubborn and appalling to those who called themselves death-worshippers or morality experts. Despite this, beneath the surface lurks a certain power, subtle in its execution but boundless in its aspirations. The core of this work makes a powerful statement, mainly through its intense honesty. 

The songs here often threaten to dive headfirst into the bombast, and petty mass-expectation that plagued the failures of most of their Swedish counterparts, but instead it teases, and then diverges into more abstract ground, through melodic deconstruction and narrative sensibility, splicing and dicing previous themes and regurgitating them with new conclusions. Carnage delve into the depths of ambiguity that lie between life and death, and through this exploration of the absurd, we can one day hope to find meaning in a universe of chaos and rampant disharmony. 

The artistic style and direction of Dark Recollections was fully realised by the remains of this band on a release called Like An Everflowing Stream using this album as a canvas to further paint horror and decay in a beautiful way.