Force the Pace

I'm surprised this album is such a niche experience. Only a small cadre of metal fans really cares about Withering Surface, but to be fair, within that small group nearly all have a lot of time for Force The Pace. It's a 2001 album that got released a few years late, and has all the components of a Swedish melodic death metal contender, except the guys are Danish. I really like the album and find it occasionally very intense and beautiful, and more often charming but flawed. All the instruments are present, and they are doing all the correct instrumenty things, but something, just something, stops most of the songs reaching the level they need to, in order to be mentioned with other genre bands they are sonically connected to.

Imagine finding a perfect undiscovered Gothenburg gem, but on closer inspection none of it quite holds up, now you have Force The Pace. Despite all these misgivings, I hold this album quite dearly- you just have to imagine it the way it nearly is, and it all works out ok. Andersen's vocals are pretty good mid to high pitched roaring, all the lyrics are quite well assembled and talk to the time period well: post industrial isolation, human malaise, loneliness, the overbearing nature of modern technology, the world-acceleration of the Internet (we were just getting on board with omnipresent broadband), urban oppression, emotional turmoil. That's how I recall 2004, your memories may vary.

What you see is what you get
Lie down, don’t pretend
Things will get better
They will not

Force The Pace opens with Gears, and to be completely fair, it's a corker of an opener- streamlined, fast paced, catchy, moderately brutal, and full of conviction. The snare is a whip crack, and the bass is very nicely thrumming away just underneath the hysteria. I'm also a sucker for a nicely mixed ride cymbal. And yes, that is some pretty killer keyboard themes kind of leaking through the mix, like a dead rave guy's hard-drive came randomly back to life in the final production sessions. I'm a big fan of the cold melodies those dance music instruments can bring, and since the 2nd half of Gen-X is bound up with rave and electronica and metal all at once, why the heck shouldn't there be bleed-through here and there?

Exit Sculpture, Machinery, Hold The Line, and Inhale The Hyper Pulse are the best of the rest, and the other tracks while not bad, are just a tiny notch down, but for sure, if you accept Force The Pace is consistently a fragment short of a treatise, you can get on board with the fact that the whole album is just about 7/10 all over, and it becomes a great album to drive to, or to enjoy while you're doing other activities which can be enhanced by semi-passive listening. I wish, wish, wish, they had found an extra 10 days of fixing up to push things just a tiny bit better in every direction. The material is there, it just needed a bit more something-something.

As far as I know the other Withering Surface stuff is slightly less good than this album, but I like this album so much despite its consistent flailing around near mediocrity, I don't want to ruin things by checking it out. Perverse, I know.