Atrocity - Todessehnsucht

God, it's hard to believe how bad Atrocity went to hell after this album...unimaginable really. How do you go from this technical atmospheric death metal masterpiece to the piece of shit that is Blut? As you know from my Hallucinations post, I absolutely adore early Atrocity...their first 2 albums specifically. Todessehnsucht (fancy Deutsch for Longing For Death) is a wonderful followup to the rather insane Hallucinations...trading out the theme of a drug abuse hell for the more spiritual (if overdone) concept of death in all it's guises. Technicality is intact, but many of the songs possess an otherworldly atmosphere that conjure up images of a graveyard at dusk, populated by cloaked figures engaged in some mysterious rite. Instead of the quirky riff oriented songwriting, we get longer more melodically driven songs that are downright epic in scope. The eerily dissonant guitar figures and chanted chorus of And the Sky Turned Red are prime examples of this shift. Such a singular album...death metal like this just isn't being made anymore.

Todessehnsucht