When record labels reissue albums these days, their reasons run the gamut from making an extra buck ("Let's re-release this year-old album but include a 20-minute DVD; the kids'll buy it!"), to wanting to revamp the audio quality (give one listen to Rhino Records' recent and much-needed revamping of the Chicago catalog), to simply providing fans and curious listeners with worthwhile archival material. The emergence of The Gathering's first two albums, courtesy of the band's own label, Psychonaut Records, and available now in North America for the first time, fits into that final category.
Believe it or not, the cult favorite started out as a band struggling to find its own sound. Over the course of The Gathering's first two little-heard albums, 1992's Always… and 1993's Almost A Dance, the band shows off its songwriting chops and atmospheric tendencies. Both albums hold their own, but both are also aural eons away from where The Gathering is today. Indeed, precious few metal bands have made as dramatic a transition over the course of their career as The Gathering — a Dutch outfit that began by injecting keyboards with straightforward death metal using both male and female vocals, then evolved into one of the genre's first female-fronted gothic/doom bands and has refused to stand still ever since.
Hans Rutten and his brother René formed the band back in 1989 with singer Bart Smits, bassist Hugo Prinsen Geerligs, keyboard player Frank Boeijen and guitarist Jelmer Wiersma. They began a career of sonic experimentation by opening gigs for bands like Morbid Angel and Death. By the time The Gathering released Always… three years later, the band was incorporating the female vocals of Marike Groot with Smits' grunts, thus unwittingly laying the groundwork for the future.
Smits wrote all of the lyrics for Always…, whose sound comes nowhere near that of The Gathering today. Smits' voice recalls other traditional, slow-dirge death-metal singers, and Groot's chilling, almost terrifying shrieks on "King For A Day" are a far cry from the angelic realms to which Anneke van Giersbergen now regularly takes the band.
For Almost A Dance, Smits and Groot were wisely replaced (or not so wisely replaced, as the move played out) by Niels Duffhues and female counterpart Martine van Loon. Duffhues took over lyric-writing duties from Smits and brought clean vocals that border on punk, courtesy of the singer's snotty, nasally tone – think Faith No More meets The Cure. Or something like that. Consequently, the mood on Almost A Dance isn't quite as somber as that on Always…, although The Gathering remained mysterious and distant, cold and rather uninspired.
While Almost A Dance makes for an intriguing listening experience, in part because of the album's novelty value, it's clear that Duffhues' tone and van Loon 's low-key style didn't blend well with The Gathering's evolving sound. The two singers were soon jettisoned, leaving the remaining band members to contemplate using sampled vocals or shifting to an all-instrumental outfit. The Gathering would later eschew both of those options, instead inviting van Giersbergen — a lovely vocalist on the local scene who had been singing everything from lullabies to speed metal — to become the band's fifth singer in three albums. She agreed, and in so doing forged a magical bond that would forever alter The Gathering's musical course. The band would never be the same again.
Track Listings
Always…
1) The Mirror Waters (7:10)
2) Subzero (6:52)
3) In Sickness and Health (7:00)
4) King For A Day (6:35)
5) Second Sunrise (6:42)
6) StoneGarden (4:58)
7) Always … (2:38)
8) Gaya's Dream (6:03)
Total Time: 48:01
Almost A Dance
1) On A Wave (5:48)
2) The Blue Vessel (6:03)
3) Her Last Flight (8:44)
4) The Sky People (4:25)
5) Nobody Dares (3:27)
6) Like Fountains (7:40)
7) Proof (6:13)
8) Heartbeat Amplifier (4:52)
9) A Passage to Desire (6:42)
Total Time: 53:58
Printer Friendly Page
Send to a Friend
