Edge of Sanity - Purgatory Afterglow (1994)^{Release ID: 616}

Another flawed yet entertaining Edge of Sanity album filled with variety and melody.

I find Edge of Sanity albums to be a little difficult at times. I've recently reviewed Unorthodox and The Spectral Sorrows and found in both cases albums that have some wonderful music, but that also contain sections that simply make me cringe. I guess it comes down to the fact that Dan Swano is simply not willing to lay down 10 tracks of one-dimensional melodic death metal. His music crosses genres often and he lets his creative juices run no matter where the result takes these albums. Purgatory Afterglow is without a doubt a better album than its predecessors, but I still can't give it more than 4 stars due to some little annoyances.

Let's look at the song Silent for example. Starts off nice enough with a little melody before kicking in with some fast drumming and a great riff. Around the minute mark, acoustic guitars take over for just a few seconds before another awesome riff takes off and Dan's growls launch over the top. The chorus is simple but effective and so far, I'm totally into this track! Then suddenly there's this simply horrible (and I mean frickin’ disgusting) cheesy little melody that kicks in around the halfway point. It's gone within 30 seconds but it all but destroys what is otherwise an awesome track. This may seem like a petty complaint, but I continually find this happening throughout the album and it leaves me contemplating how awesome this album could have been with just a little bit of restraint.

It should be obvious that I find Purgatory Afterglow to be a little frustrating at times, but there's still enough great music for me to recommend it to anyone into the melodic side of death metal. Twilight, Of Darksome Origin, Elegy and Velvet Dreams are all damn enjoyable and almost all the other tracks (Song of Sirens and Black Tears excluded) have great melodies and riffs at some point. I do find it difficult to understand how anyone can rate this album above the amazing follow-up Crimson, but then that's the beauty of opinion.

For someone that’s built such a long & passionate history with the death metal genre, I have to say that my relationship with Swedish melodic death metal outfit Edge of Sanity has never been anywhere near as strong as that of most of my extreme metal loving peers. I first became aware of them very early on in their recording career through their 1991 debut album “Nothing But Death Remains” & continued to be kept up to date as they continued on their musical journey via an Aussie tape trading colleague of mine who was utterly obsessed with the Swedish death metal phenomenon. Edge of Sanity’s 1996 fifth full-length “Crimson” (a forty minute single track progressive affair) would obviously become their pièce de resistance & I do have some time for that particular release but I still can’t say that I regard it as anything particularly special so I think it’s fair to say that Edge of Sanity’s true value has always managed to elude me, even though I’m across pretty much their entire back-catalogue to some extent. I was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago while contributing to a conversation with a couple of very enthusiastic fans on Twitter & that encounter got me wondering if it might be time to take another crack at Edge of Sanity’s highly regarded 1994 fourth album “Purgatory Afterglow” as it certainly seems to have grown in stature over the years & I can’t say that I’ve listened to much from the band in the last decade or so outside of “Crimson”. This month’s The Horde feature release seemed like a good way to open up some healthy discussion with listeners who will inevitably have differing opinions too so here we are.

The production job on “Purgatory Afterglow” is full & bright which gives the album every chance to impress the listener right from the offset. It’s interesting that Bathory mastermind Quorthon’s father Börje Forsberg is credited as the executive producer & it begs the question as to whether band leader Dan Swanö took any significant learnings away from his time with Börje given the long & illustrious production career that Dan's created for himself since. The sound of the album is quintessentially Swedish as it straddles the two major strands of death metal the country is known for with the melodic death metal sound of At The Gates & Hypocrisy being offset by glimpses of the classic Dismember/Entombed crunch. The use of clean vocals seems to draw influence from gothic rock legends Sisters of Mercy in their phrasing (although admittedly nowhere near as deep) while there are several rockier beats employed across the tracklisting. We even see the band tackling an alternative metalcore sound on closer “Song of Sirens”. Despite the attempts at creative variation, I’m not sure I hear too many signs of the progressive direction that Edge of Sanity would employ in the near future although I've admittedly been known to question how progressive a record like "Crimson" really is at times.

As with so many melodic death metal records, I unfortunately find myself struggling with the more melodically inclined & accessible material included here. I’m kinda used to this with the melodeath subgenre after all these years & it’s no surprise at all that I find the most popular tracks like “Twilight” & “Black Tears” to offer the least appeal while the songs that steer closer to the conventional death metal model (see “Of Darksome Origin” or album highlight “The Sinner & the Sadness”) got my ears pricking up the most. The better melodic moments offer hints at the quality of a record like Amorphis' classic "Tales From The Thousand Lakes" album from the same year but these glimmers of hope are sadly nowhere near as consistent as the Fins were able to achieve. The length of the album seems appropriate at 44 minutes & there’s definitely enough variety on offer to see the individual songs owning their own unique character but the whole thing just seems to feel a little bit short of the final product due to a lack of focus & perhaps the subsequent existence of “Crimson” has proven that statement to be true. It doesn’t explain the significant following that “Purgatory Afterglow” seems to enjoy these days though & I have to wonder whether that would be the case if “Crimson” had never eventuated. I suspect not but then this album was always going to see me being dragged from my musical comfort zone kicking & screaming so what would I know.

For fans of Hypocrisy, At The Gates & “Tales From The Thousand Lakes”-era Amorphis.