Dissection - Reinkaos (2006)

Dissection is a well known band, having shifted from a more melodic black metal beginning towards a rather melodic death metal style later on. If you never listened to them, the genre description should not put you off: Dissection doesn't use the loud keyboard-based annoying tunes that so often define "melodic" metal. The songs featured on "Reinkaos" are enjoyable and memorable, being what can be called "catchy", while the vocals are not of the kind that make non-black and non-death metal fans turn away: while the vocals are not exactly Sarah Brightman's, each word is distinguishable.

So how can a tune be "catchy" if we're talking about melodic black/death metal, if there are no heavy poppy keyboards? Well, it's not that hard to explain: electric guitar riffs can and do create a melodic line that I find very inspired and enjoyable. It's a classical, clean manner of building up the tune.

On the other hand, if you come with the previous Dissection albums in mind, you will find "Reinkaos" to be very different from them. Opinions are divided – there are some people who were disappointed with this release comparing to the previous ones, while others considered it the best Dissection album. I won't "state" anything in this direction, because it's up to you, the listener, to appreciate it or not.

What I can say on a personal line in regards to this album is that I found it one of the most pleasant commercial releases I listened to. Keep in mind that my musical taste is a bit weird (classical music on one hand, extremely obscure and 'kvlt' (black) metal on the other hand). I downloaded it some time at the end of 2006 and hummed it ever since, so when I found it in a big music shop in France in 2009 I finally bought it.

The CD was ripped using cdparanoia in Linux, then the .wav file was compressed to .flac. I'm not a GUI person, so I made the cue sheet from scratch, using the index times provided by cdparanoia's output. I don't know how to split the big flac on Windows, but in case you're using Linux the story is as simple as it can get:

cuebreakpoints *cue | shnsplit -o flac *flac && cuetag *cue split*flac

The archive contains a bonus video included on the CD – the original edit for "Starless Aeon" – as well as scans of the 24 pages black&white booklet (lyrics and artwork) and the back cover (the front cover is page 1 of the booklet). The scans are at 300 dpi, but the original files (.png) were huge, about 30 MB each, so I converted them to .jpgs and scaled them to 80%. They're still huge, anyway, but now at least all the scans only take up 20 MB. In case you're wondering: one of the scans seems awfully blurred (p12p13.jpg) – it's as it is in the booklet, since the fuzzy image was their idea of artwork.

Here are the MD5 sums of the four .rar volumes:

fb4faa9fe0b4cf51d44faf05eb4bc646 d06r.part1.rar
ff27a68d37867843d0dd2ebe12f6e2fc d06r.part2.rar
de2a73e2df46a4ba749beb1604154c68 d06r.part3.rar
619838d8da250d688eff93b4d46e21db d06r.part4.rar

Track listing:

1. Nexion 218 [1:32]
2. Beyond the Horizon [5:19]
3. Starless Aeon [3:59]
4. Black Dragon [4:48]
5. Dark Mother Divine [5:44]
6. Xeper-I-Set [3:08]
7. Chaosophia [0:41]
8. God of Forbidden Light [3:42]
9. Reinkaos [4:43]
10. Internal Fire [3:20]
11. Maha Kali [6:04] - listen
Total: 43:00

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