The Children of the Night

In a world devoid of originality and quality, a small number of bands have emerged to bring excellence back to music. One of these bands is Tribulation, hailing from Sweden.

At the beginning of their career they played a style of death metal similar to that of fellow Swedes Entombed, Dismember, etc. Already on their second output, The Formulas of Death, they evolved their sound immensely from being an almost tribute-sounding act, to bringing something new to the world of metal. A broader spectrum of sounds arrived here, with clear influence from progressive rock which resulted in a long record with much more variety and depth than anything in death metal at the time.

With their new record they have stripped down, and changed, their sound a lot. While the former record had a big sound and almost epic riffing at times, this record, The Children of the Night, focuses more on clean picked guitars and atmosphere. This is not a bad thing at all because they really accomplish creating these simultaneously melancholic and eerie sounding melodies that send shivers down the listeners spine.

While their two first records were rooted in death metal, the only thing that hints at the bands earlier outputs, is Johannes Andersson's raspy vocals. Everything else seems much more influenced by the aforementioned progressive rock and perhaps black metal in the atmospheric parts. In regards of this, it must also be mentioned that every song here is more or less mid-tempo, and thereby there are no blastbeats. The drummer, Jakob Ljungberg, does not try to play as technical as possible. The drumming does its job, so to speak, without being unnecessarily spectacular. What he does is keep himself in the background but create a strong backbone for the guitars to shine.

And the guitars are certainly he highlight on this record, played by the two fantastically talented guitarists, Adam Zaars and Jonathan Hultén, who do not only write those clean guitar intros but also excellent solos that lifts this record to the next level.

From this record it becomes clear that Tribulation is a band that is true to themselves and does whatever they want as a band. From the clearly Bo Hansson-inspired instrumental Själaflykt, which features a lot of organ, like the intro song Strange Gateways Beckon, to the extremely catchy singles, In the Dreams of the Death and The Motherhood of God, the bands sounds inspired, and draw influence from a wide variety of bands, and as seems so rare in the scene nowadays, creates something original without trying to sound like their idols. An exceedingly brilliant record.