Anders Nyström split from Katatonia last year after thirty-four years, telling anyone who'd listen that the band had lost patience with its own early, heavier material. It's a complaint that makes more sense once you know what he did about it the first time.
In 1993, two years into running Katatonia with Jonas Renkse, Nyström started a second band to keep the noise he wasn't allowed to make. He called it Diabolical Masquerade, wrote and played almost all of it himself, and performed under a black-metal alias, Blakkheim - a name he'd already retired once, having gone by the near-identical Blackheim in his earliest days. He then handed that old name to a fictional vampire and built an album around him.
Ravendusk in My Heart, recorded at Unisound Studio in September 1995 and released the following August on Adipocere Records, treats its own premise with a straight face. The nine tracks read like chapter titles from a novel that doesn't exist - "The Castle of Blackheim", "Blackheim's Quest to Bring Back the Stolen Autumn", "The Sphere in Blackheim's Shrine" - and Dan Swanö, who produced and engineered the record besides playing its drums and keyboards, gives the guitars a symphonic reach that keeps the songs circling back to melody rather than blasting through it. The result sounds less like a black metal record with a concept bolted on than a horror score that happens to have riffs.
Swanö reappears two years later, again alongside Nyström, as the drummer in Bloodbath, the death-metal supergroup they formed with Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth and Katatonia's own Jonas Renkse. It's the same instinct in miniature: musicians keeping their side projects strictly separate so no single band has to carry everything they want to play.
It has aged unusually well for a record this indulgent.
Peaceville has kept it in print since 2007, reissuing it on vinyl in 2019, and its fingerprints turn up in places Nyström probably didn't anticipate: Worm's Necropalace, released this February, revives the same trick of committing entirely to one monstrous character rather than gesturing at horror imagery in passing. Nyström himself kept pushing the idea further - The Phantom Lodge in 1997, Nightwork the year after, then 2001's Death's Design, sixty-one fragments imagined as the score to a Swedish horror film nobody made - before retiring Diabolical Masquerade in 2004 for want of anywhere else to take it.
Katatonia, in the years since, became the band that outgrew this kind of thing entirely, which is more or less what Nyström said as he walked away from it. Whatever he does next, the vampire got there decades ahead of him.
