THEATRE OF TRAGEDY — Musique (review)

THEATRE OF TRAGEDY — Musique album cover

Album · 2000 · Metal Related

3/5 · 2021-05-30
lukretion

The late 1990s saw an increasing number of iconic doom/death bands experiment with new sound directions. From Paradise Lost to Anathema, many bands decided to leave behind (at least temporarily) the doom metal of their beginnings and explore new ways of expressing their dark and melancholic feelings. The most shocking change of direction, though, must surely be that taken by Theatre of Tragedy with their fourth full-length Musique. In 1995 the band had kickstarted almost single-handedly the whole “beauty and the beast” doom/gothic metal scene with their self-titled debut album. However, after just one more record in this style (the fantastic Velvet Darkness They Fear), Theatre of Tragedy already started to show a desire to push the boundaries of their sound. Their third album (1998’s Aégis) saw the band almost entirely abandon the doom/death format, ditching the growls and the slow tempos in favor of a more energetic and accessible form of gothic metal. In 2000, with the EP Inperspective, the band showcased their love for electronic music, releasing heavily remixed and almost techno versions of songs from their previous full-lengths. And then came Musique, an album that cancelled almost every single aspect of the band fans once knew.

There is no trace of the band’s doom/death beginnings on this album, nor of the more straightforward but still heavily metallic gothic approach showcased on Aégis. On Musique, Theatre of Tragedy explore a new sound halfway between industrial metal, EBM and electro-goth music. The standard metal instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums) takes mostly a backseat on this album, and so do the piano and the string arrangements that the band had used so frequently on previous records. The music is instead dominated by electronic beats, loops, sound effects and keyboards. The distorted guitars are used sparingly and almost exclusively rhythmically, to add thickness and momentum to the choruses. The songs are much simpler, built around a canonic verse-chorus-verse structure, with plenty of melodic hooks and very few instrumental digressions or structural innovations. It’s a lean and catchy approach that stands in stark contrast with the sprawling compositions of the band’s previous albums, where the track length very often exceeded the 5 minutes. These changes in the instrumentation and musical approach are also accompanied by a mini-revolution in the band’s lineup, with guitarist Tommy Olsson and bassist Eirik Saltrø quitting the band without being replaced.

The vocal styles of the band’s two singers, Raymond Rohonyi and Liv Kristine Espenæs, are also completely different compared to previous albums. Raymond has nearly completely ditched his growling style of the first two albums (except for a brief episode on “Crash/Concrete”) as well as the gothic croon of Aégis. He instead uses a robotic, half-spoken singing style that brings to mind Kraftwerk and the krautrock movement. Liv Kristine abandons the operatic vocal style she had frequently used up to this point and adopts a more modern, poppier approach instead. It’s a completely new take on the “beauty and the beast” aesthetics that Theatre of Tragedy contributed to popularize in the second half of the 1990s.

But Theatre of Tragedy’s metamorphosis goes even further than this. The lyrics on Musique are at the antipodes of those on the previous three albums, where Raymond Rohonyi wrote in Old English and tackled typically romantic topics of lost love, death and tragedy. The lyrical approach on Musique could not be more different. The lyrics are written in modern English and deal with very contemporaneous and even mundane topics, like city life, computers, machines and sex. The band’s image is also completely different. Gone are the laced-up corsets, the elegant Victorian dresses and the long hair, as the band showcases instead a new look made of tight leather jackets and dyed short hair.

While these are big, bold changes that no doubt shocked more than one early-day fan, it should be said that the new musical direction Theatre of Tragedy take on Musique is nothing completely unheard before, even in the metal universe. Bands like Sundown, Samael, Paradise Lost, The Kovenant, Seigmen and Zeromancer had all dabbled with similar sonic experiments around the same time, mixing industrial, electronica, pop and gothic metal. Regardless of the novelty, Theatre of Tragedy do a great job at giving their interpretation of this aesthetic, with some excellent results. The first two tracks of the albums are absolute killers. “Machine” strikes a perfect balance between being catchy and sinister, while “City of Light” is more disturbed with its heavy industrial influences and brings to mind The Prodigy.

The rest of the album follows in a similar vein, mixing eerie electronic atmosphere, sinister robotic voices and catchy melodic hooks. And herein lies the greatest pitfall of the album. From the third track onward, when the surprise effect starts fading out, it is almost impossible not to be pervaded by a strong sense of deja-vu. The lack of variation in the song structure and tempo and in the overall sound direction makes it hard to distinguish one song from another, as the various loops and melodic hooks become almost interchangeable from song to song. There are only few moments between track #3 “Fragment” and track #11 “Space Age” that truly stand out. One is the album’s lead single “Image”. It’s a decidedly poppier piece that only features Liv on vocals, thus breaking the cycle of robotic verses – female choruses that had characterized all previous tracks. The other is the final track “Space Age”, which is my personal favourite song of the album. It’s a more atmospheric and meditative piece that unfurls slowly between computerized vocals and eerie programmed loops. It gives the album a much needed change of tempo, breaking the songwriting formula that had been (ab)used in the course of the previous ten tracks. Although this comes too late in the tracklist, it’s nevertheless a great way to finish the album on a high note.

Despite being too unidimensional and formulaic, Musique is nevertheless a pleasant album that represents a bold change of direction for Theatre of Tragedy. The feeling I get from this record is that the band is not yet fully in control of the new sonic approach. As a consequence, the album lacks subtlety and depth, giving it limited repeated listening value. The band will do much better on their follow-up record, 2002’s Assembly, which will continue with the same sonic approach but in a decidedly more mature and assured manner. If you have not listened to this phase of the band’s discography, I suggest you start with Assembly first, and only get Musique if you like what you hear on that record.