After Anders and Jonas scared us with their announcement of a hiatus, fans of Katatonia rejoiced when word of a new album arrived. I consider Katatonia one of my top 5 favorite bands, but I must admit that I was nervous when I heard that Jonas wrote the entire record himself. Having lived with City Burials for a couple of months now, I’m pleased to say that my skepticism was unfounded and I rank the album as one of their best.
For better or worse, you pretty much know what you’re going to get from a Katatonia record these days. Since Night Is the New Day, the band has settled into a comfortable style: dark, melancholic, mid-tempo metal with unique, emotive vocals. City Burials follows the same blueprint, but with some refinements. First, Jonas’ vocals have never sounded better. From the opening strains of ‘Heart Set to Divide’ to the nuanced performance on stunning closer ‘Untrodden’, it’s clear that the time away was put to good use.
Musically, the guitar work is wonderful, particularly in the solos: check out ‘Untrodden’ and ‘Behind the Blood’, which also serves an opening riff that is a pinch harmonic away from being straight out of the 80’s (and I mean that in the best possible way). Everything else will feel stylistically comfortable for those who have followed the band on their last couple of records.
So where does that leave us with City Burials? If you aren’t really a fan of the band, there isn’t much here that will persuade you otherwise. For the uninitiated, it’s probably as good a place as any to start. For my part, as I enter into nearly 15 years of fandom, I’d rank it as one of their best: below The Great Cold Distance and Night is the New Day, but a more complete record than Viva Emptiness and Last Fair Deal Gone Down, both of which I adore. I anticipate that this is one that I will turn to frequently and is sure to find an entry on my year-end list.
While I love Jonas Renkse's vocals, it's been a while since I've enjoyed a Katatonia album from start to finish. Actually, it's been a really long time, all the way back to 2003's Viva Emptiness, if I'm being honest. Their shift away from traditional metal riffs and vocal hooks over the years has largely left me cold. I've continued to keep up with the band, mostly because Jonas is still one of my favorite metal singers. His duet with Anneke van Giersberge on Ayreon Universe's ‘Comatose’ was one of the highlights of 2018 for me, and ‘Serein’ off of The Fall of Hearts is a fantastic song that I still listen to regularly (why can't they write more choruses like that???).
So my expectations for this album were somewhat low going in. I was hoping for a standout track or two and prepared to write the rest off as not for me. I'm happy to report that City Burials really is—pretty much—as good as Brian says it is. I might rate it a touch lower, just because I still feel a mild frustration with the band's seemingly willful refusal to write a blockbuster hook. I don't need every song to immediately grab me, but it would be nice to have a few more peaks amid the valleys here.
‘Behind The Blood’ is about as catchy as things gets, and it's a damn good song, but not head and shoulders above anything else on the album. If I were writing a track-by-track review of City Burials, I'd probably rate every song somewhere between a 7 and an 8. As with most of Katatonia's latter-day material, I find myself appreciating the songs more than actually being moved by them, and this sounds like the kind of music one ought to feel strongly about.
Instead, City Burials is a very even listen. I enjoy it every time I put it on, and find myself itching to hear it more often than I'd expect. Given how much I've been inclined to come back to it, I keep expecting it to make the leap from “great” to “album of the year material”. It hasn't gotten there for me yet, but the year's not over.