Halloween night, 31 October 2008, the Rolling Stone club in Milan: the headline show of the Fiction tour, and one of the very last concerts that room ever held. The film of it runs one hour and forty-eight minutes and was released on 23 October 2009, in Germany and digitally, three days ahead of the rest of Europe. Dark Tranquillity threw a wake. Within a year the club itself would be gone, and the six on stage tore at its walls as if to strip it bare before anyone else could. Nobody inside wanted to go home.
Get one thing straight before you buy, because the package is a reliquary of its own. The kingsize mediabook stacks two DVDs on two CDs, and the second DVD carries a 47-minute documentary, seven promo videos and a vault of old footage from 1991 onwards. Lovely. Not the point. The point is the concert: the intro and twenty songs that the 2CD and the first DVD share, mixed and mastered by Tue Madsen at Antfarm Studio in Denmark. You are buying a show, and the show is what carries the weight.
The band was honest about the bar. Its first official DVD, Live Damage (2002), was "OK for its time, but hardly spectacular", the band said in a statement published by Blabbermouth on 21 August 2009. Rare candour. It tells you exactly what this one was built to bury.
Mikael Stanne at the microphone, Niklas Sundin and Martin Henriksson on guitars, Daniel Antonsson on bass, Anders Jivarp behind the kit and Martin Brändström on the electronics, the six men who had dragged a stage show of custom projections through the whole autumn of 2008 marched into Milan with songs written between 1992 and their newest record, and hammered twenty years of songs flat into a single night for a crowd that sings back nearly every line. The room is the seventh member. You hear it everywhere.
Italy is home to some of the most devoted and enthusiastic DARK TRANQUILLITY fans on earth, something which is very obvious from the footage.
Dark Tranquillity, statement published by Blabbermouth, 21 August 2009
The band plays tight. No slack, no drift, no tired bars in the middle of a long set. "The Treason Wall" opens the set as a barrage at point blank, a Damage Done song chosen to flatten the front rows before anyone has found a beer, and from there the weight of the evening falls where the tour was pointed: Fiction supplies seven of the twenty songs, and "Terminus (Where Death Is Most Alive)" gets the last word and lends the release its title.
Then the wake does what wakes do. It opens the old albums. "Edenspring" and "Lethe" come back from The Gallery of 1995 and "Dreamlore Degenerate" from The Mind's I, rarities pulled out of the drawer like yellowed photographs passed hand to hand among the faithful, and "Yesterworld / Punish My Heaven" stitches a song from the 1992 seven-inch A Moonclad Reflection onto the opener of The Gallery, the corpse of the early band sewn back onto its first great record and walked around the room one more time.
"ThereIn" is the odd man out, and it matters. It is the only song from Projector on the night besides "FreeCard", the 1999 record that pushed Stanne's clean voice to the front, and in a set built on the newer material it is the moment the evening breathes. Century Media put it up as an official clip on release day. Good call.
The guest spot earns its place too. Nell Sigland of Theatre of Tragedy walks on for "Insanity's Crescendo" and comes back later for "The Mundane and the Magic", singing live the part she sang on the studio version in 2007. Two voices, one stage, no gimmick. Then "Final Resistance" brings the knuckles: a Damage Done song under four minutes long, all knuckles, picked by the label as the lead official video from the release. It does not waste a second. It does not need one.
The room is the seventh member. You hear it everywhere.
The catch is the format. The sound is clean, clear and heavy, and that cleanliness is also what the audio edition cannot escape. The tour was built around projections, and the 2CD strips every one of them away and leaves you with the crowd's voice and no faces to put it on. And the middle of the career gets the thinnest slice of the night: one song from Haven, two from Damage Done, while Fiction takes seven. I keep one rule about anniversary sets: every era gets a chair at the table. On a night sold as twenty years of history, two more songs from the turn of the century would have turned a great show into a definitive one.
Here the Gothenburg sound is caught as it was when it still meant six men, a crowd and a closing club with nowhere better to be on Halloween. The concert holds up from the first barrage to the last rites of "Terminus (Where Death Is Most Alive)", the band at full tension and the room singing every verse back at it. Buy it for the songs. A building sent off by the people who loved it does not get recorded twice, and this is the one recording.