Candlemass: Ancient Dreams (35th anniversary, marble vinyl) [PEACEVILLE]

Why you'll love it

This 35th anniversary pressing comes on marble vinyl with a printed inner sleeve. Ancient Dreams was the Swedish doom pioneers' first album to chart in the US.

This edition

• 35th anniversary edition
• Marble vinyl
• Printed inner sleeve
• Lyrics included

About the album

Plenty of metal albums borrow a painting for the cover, but few reach for a 19th-century American landscape master. Candlemass chose Youth, the second canvas in Thomas Cole's series The Voyage of Life, and it suits the grand, slow-moving music inside perfectly. Rex Gisslén mixed it at Montezuma Studios in Stockholm, and Peter Dahl mastered it at Polar Studios.

The classic line-up is all here, with Messiah Marcolin's operatic vocals out front, Lars Johansson on lead guitar, Mats Björkman on rhythm, Leif Edling on bass and Jan Lindh on drums. "Mirror, Mirror" opens with a riff like a slow landslide, "A Cry From The Crypt" and "Darkness In Paradise" keep the weight on, and "Incarnation Of Evil" reworks Black Messiah, an old song from Edling's earlier band Nemesis. The title track and "The Bells Of Acheron" are doom at its most majestic.

The closing "Epistle No. 81" sets words by Carl Michael Bellman, the Swedish poet and musician who died in 1795. That must make him one of the oldest songwriters ever to share a sleeve with a doom metal band, and he fits in remarkably well.

Also at Kops: more Candlemass on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Peaceville (cat# VILELP1106), a reissue of the 1988 album.