DREAMS OF DEATH AND DISMAY

"Dreams of Death and Dismay" is the 2nd full-length studio album by Swedish death metal act Anata. The album was released through Season of Mist in April 2001. The band´s debut album "The Infernal Depths Of Hatred (1998)" was to my ears a pretty generic sounding US influenced death metal album. Decent but ultimately too standard to stand out.

On "Dreams of Death and Dismay", Anata pretty much continue where they left off on the debut album. US influenced death metal with a few hints to the more melodic Swedish variant. There´s nothing wrong with the level of musicianship on the album and that´s actually the greatest asset this band has because they have real trouble writing memorable music. Now death metal is per definition very powerful music but there´s a big difference in the way the music is composed and delivered by the leaders and the followers in the genre. The material on "Dreams of Death and Dismay" are generally generic and lack any form of original approach and it´s obvious that Anata belong in the latter catagory of followers. Listening to this album I´m not able to tell that it´s Anata I´m listening to and that´s a real issue in my book. Thousands of bands sound like this. After only a couple of tracks my attention start to wander and that´s always a bad sign.

"Dreams of Death and Dismay" is a very generic sounding death metal release and Anata unfortunately seem content with just playing run of the mill death metal. However as the level of musicianship is high, the sound production is decent, and there´s nothing really offensive on the album (other than the fact that the material are generally pretty bland) a 2.5 star (50%) rating is still deserved.