Fourteen days. Eight tracks. Thirty years of imitators.
Recorded between 17 and 30 March 1995 at Hellspawn and Unisound with Dan Swanö at the desk and the band producing itself, and released by Nuclear Blast on 17 November of the same year, Storm of the Light's Bane is the second Dissection album and the single most copied record the Swedish scene has produced. The chapter on Sweden and Finland places it in its scene. This is the record itself: what is on it, how it is put together, and what happened to the four men who made it.
What is actually on it
It opens on "At the Fathomless Depths", an instrumental with an intro that does not set a mood so much as shut a door behind the listener, and then goes straight into "Night's Blood", which is where the method announces itself: two guitars in parallel over a blast beat, a figure that comes back three times in the song and is thickened on each return. "Unhallowed" follows with the same construction at a lower tempo. "Where Dead Angels Lie" is the piece everybody knows, and the reason is the writing rather than the speed: it is built around a slow harmonised refrain that any competent guitarist can play and almost nobody can make sound like this.
The second half is the harder one. "Retribution - Storm of the Light's Bane" is the title piece and the most aggressive thing here. "Thorns of Crimson Death" is the long one, the piece where the arrangement is allowed to breathe; Alexandra Balogh is credited with additional piano on the album. "Soulreaper" is the compact one, the closest the band came to writing something with a chorus. "No Dreams Breed in Breathless Sleep" closes it, and it closes it properly: a last statement of the record's central harmonic idea rather than a fade.
| # | Track | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | At the Fathomless Depths | instrumental, shuts the door |
| 2 | Night's Blood | the method stated in full |
| 3 | Unhallowed | the same writing, slower |
| 4 | Where Dead Angels Lie | the harmonised refrain everybody copied |
| 5 | Retribution - Storm of the Light's Bane | the title piece, the fastest |
| 6 | Thorns of Crimson Death | the long form, with piano |
| 7 | Soulreaper | the compact one, nearly a chorus |
| 8 | No Dreams Breed in Breathless Sleep | the close, and a real one |
How the two guitars are written
Jon Nödtveidt played lead guitar and sang, Johan Norman played rhythm, Peter Palmdahl played bass and Ole Öhman played drums, and the interesting thing is how little of that is guesswork on the record. The harmony parts are written out rather than improvised, they move in parallel thirds and sixths, and because both guitars are tremolo picked continuously the two lines fuse into one thickened voice instead of reading as two players. Underneath, the blast beat occupies the low and middle of the mix and leaves the top free, so the melody holds still on top of the blast the way a bird holds still in a headwind.
The harmony parts are written out rather than improvised, and because both guitars are tremolo picked continuously the two lines fuse into one thickened voice instead of reading as two players.
The other structural decision is that the songs return. Sections come back, transposed or with the harmony filled in more thickly than the first time, which is heavy metal architecture rather than black metal architecture, and it is why this album can be listened to as an album rather than as a texture. Eight pieces joined like cabinetwork and then finished in frost. That is a description of the writing, not a compliment about the atmosphere; the atmosphere is a consequence.
What is not on it
Half of what makes the record work is what its makers left out, and the omissions are easier to list than the contents. There is no keyboard carrying a lead line, which is the decision that separates this from everything Norway was doing with orchestration in the same eighteen months. There are no clean vocals anywhere. There is no acoustic interlude in the middle, no spoken passage, no guest singer and no ballad. The album does not slow down to let the listener recover and it does not run long enough to need to.
The reception followed. AllMusic gave it four and a half stars out of five and the German site Metal.de gave it a full ten, and it has since turned up near the top of retrospective lists, at number three among the metal albums of 1995 in Loudwire's ranking and at number two in LA Weekly's list of essential metal records. Those are unusual positions for an album made in fourteen days by four men in their early twenties on an independent budget, and they have held for three decades without a reissue campaign or a reunion to prop them up.
The room, and the sleeve
Dan Swanö engineered and mixed, in the same building where The Somberlain had been made two years earlier, and the difference between the two records is instructive: the 1993 album has the ideas and loses some of them in the mix, while the 1995 one has fewer ideas and lands every one of them. Kristian Wåhlin, who signs his artwork Necrolord, painted the sleeve, and it did as much work as the music in fixing what this branch of the genre was supposed to look like. He would still be painting sleeves for bands built on this record two decades later.
The record has been reissued twice, as a digipak with bonus tracks in 2002 and as a two disc edition with alternate mixes and demo material in 2006, which is the version to buy if the demos are of interest and the wrong version to hear first if they are not.
What happened to the band
Peter Palmdahl left in 1997. In December of that year Jon Nödtveidt was arrested, and he was convicted as an accessory to the murder of Josef ben Meddour, who was killed on 22 July 1997. He was sentenced to ten years and released in 2004. Dissection released no new music for the whole of that period.
The band returned with Reinkaos, issued on 30 April 2006, whose lyrics were drawn from the religious order Nödtveidt had joined; the record is a different band making different music and it is not the reason anyone is reading this page. Dissection played a last European concert in Stockholm on 24 June 2006 and disbanded. Nödtveidt died on 13 August 2006. His death was a suicide.
What it left behind
The template outlived all of it. Thulcandra in Germany rebuilt this exact method from 2010 onward and went to the same illustrator and eventually to the same engineer to do it. In Aphelion, formed in 2020 by three members of Necrophobic, are working the same ground from inside the Swedish scene that produced it. Bands in Oregon, Poland and Finland have taken the harmonised line and moved it into their own material, and none of them found a way past the arrangement decisions made in a studio in Örebro over fourteen days in 1995.
That is what makes this an album rather than a landmark: it still tells the people who copy it what to do. The technique it fixed, and the three separate traditions that grew out of it, are set out in melodic Black Metal, and the northern scene that answered it with something completely different is in black Metal Bands From Finland.
