Band:	Darkane
Album:	Expanding Senses
Style:	Death metal, Thrash metal
Release date:	August 26, 2002
Guest review by:	Spyroid

01. Innocence Gone
02. Solitary Confinement
03. Fatal Impact
04. Imaginary Entity
05. Violence From Within
06. The Fear Of One´s Self
07. Chaos Vs Order
08. Parasites Of The Unexplained
09. Submission
10. Growing Hate [Japanese bonus]

Though this may not really be Gothenburg metal, the band often gets stuffed together with other Swedish bands like In Flames, Arch Enemy, Soilwork (the last of which are from the same town) etc. Which is a shame, because that might be the main reason this band often gets overlooked and has to stand in the shadows of other Swedish bands that they actually don't have much in common with. In fact they out-rule theese bands in every point.

Darkane's music on this album is a strange hybrid which has it's roots in agressive modern death/thrash metal or whatever you want to call that genre - I'm talking about thrash but not thrash as if Megadeth. Touches of industrial music, technical riffs and unique progressive/psychedelic touches are enough experimenting to make this everything I want a modern thrash album to be, not to forget - a totally unique singer and great musicians.

This is a superbly produced album. The drums are perfect with a lot of simple duple meter (a must for me in a really good modern thrash album) but never get boring. You can really hear that the drummer contributed a lot to the compositions. Some of his fills are really insane - check out the intro of "Parasites of the Unexplained" and you will see what I mean! The guitar riffs are original - technical, but still catchy and together with the drums they form the aggresive structure of this album. While the music is often extremely catchy, it still never gets melodic in a cheesy way, which all other Swedish metal bands seem to do. This has much to do with the singer Andreas Sydow - as mentioned he sings in a totally uniqe way (his performance is not at it's top here but still great). You have to hear him for yourself to understand. It's not growling, not screaming - more like some kind of agressive talking - but not rapping in any way. He sounds like an angry robot or something, which together with sophisticated lyrics about insanity helps to build the industrial atmosphere of the album. Don't worry though if you don't like crunchy industrial productions - that's not the case here. Besides, all songs are great, except maybe the singles "Innocence is Gone" and "Chaos vs. Order" which aren't as experimenting and are a bit too simple.

The sentence: "Banging my head in the wall, hearing the demons call" from "Parasites of the Unexplained" should be enough reason for any fan of modern thrash metal to check this album out. Highly recommended!