Edge of Sanity - Infernal (1997)

'Infernal' was the final Edge of Sanity recording under the classic line-up of Dan Swanö, Andreas Axelsson, Sami Nerberg, Anders Lindberg and Benny Larsson as rising artistic differences between Dan and Andreas had reached there peak and forced the band apart, but not before they cut one final record with this line-up..., well sort of. The eleven songs feature three different line-up combination's of these five gentlemen plus Peter Tagtgren of Hypocrisy playing lead guitar on, 'The Bleakness of It All' as well as four different guest lyricists with the most notably being Michael Akerfeldt (Opeth) & Jonas Renske (Katatonia).

Musically Infernal is a rough and wild ride of the classic progressive death metal sound that EoS was already known for at this time (Dan wrote these five songs) while some of Axelsson's songs seem to hanker back to the, 'Nothing but Death Remains' days.

Despite all the chaos and for what its worth songs like, 'Hell Is Where the Heart Is' & '15:36' are some of the best songs Dan ever wrote and as I already said its totally classic EoS here while, 'Losing Myself' is one of Dan's entirely clean vocal alternative metal songs, which much like the songs in this vein before them is quite outstanding and catchy. 'The Last Song' is interesting as well since it opens with a melancholic cello & piano duo and despondent lead vocals before diving into a mid-paced and quite stunning instrumental and eventually ambient ending.

The remaining songs are wrote by Axelsson and four of them do feature Dan's hard growling vocals, but are clean vocal and progressively lacking, and as I already said it sounds a lot like the first EoS album. On the other hand, 'Helter Skelter' & 'The Bleakness of It All' are interesting songs since they have a sound that's reminiscent of Marduk's, 'Dark Endless,' which in case you didn't know featured Andreas as the vocalist. Although these songs are not as fast they are still speedy little death metal numbers with black-ish vocals and you know lot's of people have always considered Marduk to be black metal band, but if you go back to this first album and listen you'll see under all the corpsepaint and upside down crosses that musically its very much a death metal album.

In the end, 'Infernal' is a very uneven album, but some truly great songs still do grace it, but if the journey is to weird then just rip all the songs, throw 'em on your mp3 player and enjoy them on a more random basis.

After this album Dan was booted and in the same year Robban Karlsson stepped in to replace him and although I haven't heard, 'Cryptic' yet, I hear its not as bad as some people make it out to be, its just different. In 1999 Dan recorded, 'Moontower' solely, which some people actually consider to be the true ending of EoS. Edge of Sanity then broke up, but as you may know Dan revived it in 2003 and released, 'Crimson II' before finally letting Edge of Sanity rest in peace.