AVATARIUM: Between You, God, The Devil And The Dead (HARD ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Thirteen years on, Avatarium have carved out a highly personal blend of doom, hard rock and progressive, all enveloped by female vocals as bewitching as they are dramatic. Unanimously respected, the Swedes are certainly not enjoying the success they deserve, but they are nonetheless pursuing an impeccable career that is regularly enriched by new gems. “Between You, God, The Devil And The Dead” is the latest. The band's loyal fans will be neither disoriented nor disappointed by this sixth offering, which follows in the flamboyantly funereal footsteps of its predecessors.

Avatarium's identity was already sketched out on the eponymous debut, but by gradually freeing itself from the tutelage of the Candlemass bassist (Leif Edling) who left the band four years after its debut, the band has established its own unique, instantly recognizable style, which the successor to “Death, Where Is Your Sting” further refines with the customary tenebrous elegance of its creators. Jennie-Ann Smith's powerful, inhabited voice and Marcus Jidell's guitar, shining with a fiery darkness, irrigate these heavy compositions in whose hearth a racy melancholy is consumed.

As ever, the eight tracks on this enigmatically-titled album are, like their predecessors, finely chiselled pieces whose treasures nestle in the misty folds of their twilight intimacy. Starting with those layers of antediluvian keyboards that drape a dark yet shimmering underpinning, as if the late Jon Lord had participated in Black Sabbath ('I See You Better In The Dark'). This borrowing from seventies hard rock isn't the only thing that hovers over the whole set, to which Marcus Jidell sometimes imbues a very Blackmorian bite ('Long Black Waves').

In the midst of appropriately heavy protrusions, such as 'Being With The Dead', with its doomy seams, albeit subdued by sensitive guitar, or 'Until Forever And Again', as if trapped in a gangue as icy as it is tragic, surprising laments slip in, even though they never emerge from a haunting mist. Let's take 'My Hair Is On Fire', whose skeletal appearance does little to conceal the dull tension pulsing in its darkly majestic arcana. Stained with acoustic touches as beautiful as an asleep cat, 'Lovers Give A Kingdom To Each Other' is adorned with Led Zeppelin-like ornaments, while 'Notes From Underground' forges a curious, entirely instrumental path, at once stony and Victorian and, above all, virtuosic. Equally astonishing is the eponymous conclusion, a silky, fragile breath that quietly builds towards an overwhelming finale.

While its predecessors had set the bar very high, “Between You, God, The Devil And The Dead” surpasses it, a moment-by-moment delight, funereal and intimate. - Official website

AVATARIUM

BETWEEN YOU, GOD, THE DEVIL AND THE DEAD

AFM RECORDS

HARD ROCK