Therion
A’arab Zaraq Lucid Dreaming (Nuclear Blast)
by Scott Hefflon
To admit that the latest Therion album with a title I don’t understand is not what I was expecting is an understatement. It has more to do with preconceptions than the actual quality of the record. The last release, Theli, was so indescribable, it took me 1000 words to touch on the ideas it blasted out. Imagine pop culture composer Danny Elfman redoing the Nightbreed soundtrack and really taking it the distance. Imagine if Elfman lived up to his fuckin’ name and dredged up inner images of nightmare and fantasy, then had the know-how to recreate the images in your head using sound. That was Theli. This isn’t. This record is split between a rock album (with covers of the Scorpions’ “Fly to the Rainbow,” Judas Priest’s “Here Come the Tears,” Running Wild’s “Under Jolly Roger,” and Iron Maiden’s “Children of the Damned” for fuck’s sake) combined with leftovers from the Theli sessions and material intended as a soundtrack to the Swedish art film The Golden Embrace. What that means, in a nutshell, is that the first half of this record has a few ideas you’d have liked to hear on Theli, yet the songs surrounding those ideas are not up to par, and the rest of the first half is filler (i.e. needless powermetal covers that prove, sure, Therion can rip shit up in intensity, style, and production, but when you get right down to it, who cares?).
And the second half, the classical version of the soundtrack? Well, you know soundtrack scoring; it’s meant to accompany and strengthen imagery on a screen and without it, you’re left trying to create the visuals in your head from the hints of the music. Naturally, there are swooping, grandiose passages bursting with emotion and motion: chase scenes filled with fear, icy landscapes racing by at breakneck speeds, crucial moments of discovery and thought-provoking enlightenment, but there is repetition and a sense of not getting the whole picture. In a well-choreographed chase scene, the viewers shouldn’t say to themselves, “Goodness! The character is being chased by unspeakable evil! Run! Run! Run by that beautiful, snow-covered church! Run by that breath-taking icy lake! Run through frozen, empty streets, the only sound the crunching of snow beneath your boots and your labored, pluming breath! Run by, well, another church… Yup, there’s another lake… How come no one’s on any of the streets you’re running down?” Sometimes you want the character to get caught just so the chase’ll be over and we can segue into some grisly, gratuitous, limb-rending gore. But, to be fair to an artist as obviously talented as Christofer Johnsson, Therion is an amazing concept (especially when enlisting the musical help of Edge of Sanity’s Dan Swano and the dark magik knowledge of Dragon Rouge Lodge’s Thomas Karlsson), and one that, even on a platter of odds and ends like this, deserves your attention.
