I liked that a lot.
I've listened to a lot more Dark Tranquility over the last year or so than I ever did before, especially since Days of the Lost came out and I wanted to see how much of their sound came from IF, and how much from DT. To be honest, while I've -quite- liked a lot of what I heard, it mostly washed over me, like, it was nice to listen to at the time, but it felt much more ambient than In Flames and lacked a melodic focal point to make it memorable. That song was the first that I've heard that I think I may come back to frequently.
Do you mean all DT, or their more recent stuff specifically? Their early stuff is very much in line with the MDM scene of the period and there are a number of absolute classics on Of Chaos & Eternal Night and The Gallery. The Mind's I was a solid if slightly lesser follow up to The Gallery - Zodijackyl Light and Insanity's Crescendo are incredible.
Projector - a very experimental album for a band so early on in their career, with a burgeoning new scene they helped start developing around them. I neither like nor dislike Projector, it's just OK, but I appreciate the endeavour. Kind of ironic that they went from this earlier in their career to having a very distinct "DT sound" by this point. I guess time changes all of us in the end - and band members have come and gone too.
Then you've got Haven which I can't stand. Boring AF to me. Much like Projector it's a polarising album though, some do like it.
You then move on to the phase of their career that most people remember them for and know most fondly - Damage Done / Character / Fiction. Three top tier mid-2000s MDM albums which shed a lot of the earlier experimentation and just go hard as hell on delivering solid, killer metal with a couple of slower tracks here and there. A trio of wonderful albums and Damage Done remains one of my all-time favourites to this day.
After that you get the Industrial-DT period with We Are The Void (appropriate title) and Construct. This is where they lost me for a while. Very little interest in what they were doing during this time - although, again, I have to stress that the music they were attempting to create wasn't bad. As musicians they are too dedicated and talented to produce bad music. It just isn't music I care for.
Atoma - nice little album. More melody, increased tempo, more like the DT I was used to. Just not enough tracks that are truly memorable - solid but unspectacular, and you can say that for almost all DT output from Atoma onwards. Moment is different to Atoma but, for me at least, still suffers the same fate of being good without having anything truly spectacular that makes me want to come back to it very often. I get the feeling the new album will go the same way.
So yeah, to me it feels like DT have been quite varied throughout their career - early pure MDM stuff, weird experimental phase, mid-2000s MDM era, the pivot to an Industrial-ish sound, then present DT which is kind of like their mid-2000s era but not as good.
