It is amazing how high this special band keeps the quality of its releases, when in the last few years, it has seen the departure of three founding members who were also main composers. Now, from the original line-up only Michael Stanne is left, who stated that the title of the Swedes’ thirteenth full-length does not, fortunately, indicate the end of their career but the beginning of something new.
“Endtime Signals” is still a very good album from Dark Tranquillity, although it might take a few times to win over the listener as it is not as straight-forward as 2020’s wonderful “Moment”. A comparison could be made with “We Are The Void” and “Construct” mainly because of the different elements between the songs, something I believe Johan Reinholdz has a big part in. The guitarist comes from the prog scene and he may have been in the band for only four years but he has bonded so well in this position that he has a comfort as if he has been for much longer.
For example, “Unforgivable” is a very fast track in which we hear blast beats again. On the contrary, “False Reflections” and “One Of Us Is Gone” are very calm having only clean vocals while in the last one there are violin, viola and cello. Overall, the album has both its more extreme moments and its more melodic ones. Stanne is enjoyable no matter how he sings, Reinholdz does a great work on riffs/melodies/solos and Martin Brändström once again proves to be an integral cog in the machine, ideally dressing the compositions with his characteristic keyboard sound.
“Endtime Signals”, as I wrote at the beginning, is an album that needs to be listened to. The songs don’t follow a pattern and have different structures between them. The result has variety and I would say a prog character. Maybe that’s why it’s not easy to “catch” it from the beginning. But it is still another high quality release from this great Gothenburg band which has never made a mediocre or bad album in its history.
