With the re-release of an album like Viva Emptiness it’s as well for me to state where I stand on the original. I owe Katatonia more than most bands as, without being overly dramatic ‘Discouraged Ones’ had a definite hand in saving my life, but Viva Emptiness is something else entirely. It is a 10/10 classic, an emotional wrenching and artistically inspiring experience like few albums I know; brilliant songwriting and a very special, dark touch of storytelling combining for an intense, sometimes frighteningly violent journey. For me, and for quite a few others, it is the pinnacle of their career, hugely so, and everything since has been somehow a pallid mask of the band who created this, soul removed. It’s where we parted company. For every one of us though there seems to be two or three for whom this was the jumping on point and everything before was not really worth too much investigation. So a dividing point too. A dangerous thing for a band to re-visit maybe.
So why have they? Well apparently they were never happy with some aspects, Some keyboard parts in particular, the absence of a song intended for the album, that kind of thing. It certainly has had a lovely bit of repackaging; book cover, new artwork by the same artist and based on the original so… Inwards.
Viva Emptiness is a bleak, bitter album. I often liken it to a train journey on a cold October night; your face is pressed against the icy black window rather than turned to your fellow travellers in the feeble lit carriage interior. You don’t want to talk, you don’t want to engage, you just stare into that black as the train rattles through the outskirts of a breaking, rusting industrial city that you will never see again. You flash by windows, low rise concrete flats, rectangles of yellow light in that endless dark and, occasionally, you see people there in those rooms. They flicker by but in that moment you are pulled into their world. You see things that are snatches of a long story, movements of life, and you have no idea if what you see is a beginning, an end, or just that endless motion in between. People unable to talk to each other, lone figures at tables speaking to empty chairs, political discussions, flashes of unspeakable, but often depressingly mundane violence that sicken you but pass so quickly you are never entirely sure what you really saw. It’s a frightening but oh, so familiar place, one you are running from and yet there it is again just on the other side of the glass.
Viva Emptiness is the album that shows the richness in shades of grey, the detail that you can achieve with the most perfect of brush strokes.
You enter through ‘Ghost Of The Sun’; jagged riff driving forward as the soft vocals almost whisper to you. Punctuated by a touch of piano, quiet moments seemingly of emotional confusion, the dying gasp of black metal vocals in the harsh chorus “I trusted you, you lied, it’s all I hear; a fucking lie. Betrayal at the outset, the recurrent theme of this city of glass that I live in.” A world with nowhere to hide from those watching your torment.
‘Sleeper’ is cacophony, fading recited voices and hard noise as you plunge deeper into the city, more isolated. Loss engulfs you here. ‘Criminals’ is real world horror, mundane pettiness twisted beyond ugly: “He came back to her house. I never took it as a promise, always thought it was a lie. He went too far the fucker, it’s not like I owe him money. This is different.” And the chorus that simply rips every raw emotion of loss and violent anger into the open. Three songs in and it has already gone further than most bands do in their career.
‘A Premonition ‘ is almost wistful in comparison, but even here gentle words have an undercurrent of violence that rises in the chorus to be unavoidable. Control is the driver, control to still the horrors of the sleeping mind when depression stalks your mind.
Hard, almost industrial riffs break the walls on ‘Will I Arrive’, uncertainty and tension lies in the contrast between verse and chorus. ‘Burn The Remembrance’ is trying to move on, the questions of ‘what if?’, ‘what will? ‘, ‘if only’ causing indecision and in that frozen moment the painful memories flood in. These are the endless circles of a soul trapped in regret, depression, loneliness. ‘Wealth’ spits words at first, isolated ones before we fall towards those placid, melancholy moments; puddles in the dirt. Tugging melodies grab at the confused place you stand in. ‘One Year From Now’ is more questions and a yearning that reaches out, tries to comfort but the depths of self doubt and fear engulf the song until the tenderness of “everything I have I will give to you” turns to obsession and that undercurrent of self destructive anger.
“They held me up against the wall, too young to be ignored” is the cry of being caught up in events, things whirling beyond control. A political rising? The collapse of one? The scene is never clear, never certain. It is the frightened response of one person and the beautiful, slicing chorus the expression of greater things out of control. ‘Complicity’ goes hand in hand, talking of missions, of not failing “this time.” But the more strident the chorus, the less certainty of success there is beyond “I have no right to let it go…”
‘Evidence’ is just petrifying terror. It begins with a phasing, hard edged but subtle guitar run, the softest of vocals until that loud, haunting riff crashes into your guts and they say with a voice holding too much pain “be still for a moment, everything depends upon you, if you die I will die too. Once we were heroes, everything has changed since then. Now they recognise you too…” The story is oblique, passing you by at an odd angle but emotionally wrenching and the sense of life in the balance tangible. Compelling, chill inducing music.
‘Omerta’ is a hidden knife, a sense of the semi-acoustic, a jangling lilting song. The window in the night shows two old friends meeting after years, sitting down at a shabby bar. One talks, gabbles, over eager, happy though perhaps knowing this cannot be chance or good but refusing to believe that. The other is silent. The words continue warm and happy, the undertow desperate and knowing. Something is very wrong, there is death in this scene and the sudden stop is like the lights going out, the punctuation of a knife cutting off those warm words mid-sentence. Gone.
‘Wait Outside’ is the addition. At first the riff jolts, not perhaps from the same cloth, but them the voice, the keyboards, the clouds swim in and we are pulled under, back into the depths of the album once more. A warning this time, a request. “Will you hold on? Can you hold on?” And into the darkness they slowly walk. The final throw of the dice in events you will never understand.
‘Inside The City Of Glass’ ends our journey. Dreamlike, drifting, tide like it laps gently, darkly at some deserted waterfront and softly pulls out to sea what the city has finished with. Through a spiralling guitar and new echoing vocals you are pulled away from the train window and its sights, the lights fade behind you and your train heads to whatever destination it is bound to. It leaves only the quiet and whatever the dark water has taken…
So what has this re-recording added beyond one song and some added vocals, what has it taken away if anything? In truth little. This is more the tinkering of the perfectionist, the hands of OCD. The keyboards are often more lush, a little more orchestrated in parts but the essential nature is still there and, dare I say in places more tightly defined by the mix. It is less sparse I suppose but the utter bleakness of Viva Emptiness is such that this is more akin to a pinch more salt here, a little less there. The mix has at times clouded a few vocal lines, but if this is good or bad will depend on mood and where you stand in the post/pre Viva Emptiness divide; and the drum mix is arguably better here.
For me this still stands as an almost perfect album; that rarity where stories are told, gut wrenching emotion laid bare and the final meaning the listener finds is from within themselves. This is not “too much fucking emo” as they once wrote. This is emotion. The real thing, carried by stories travelling on truly haunted melodies and riffs. It is timeless, a classic, genuinely important and one of the greatest albums I have ever heard.
Buy which version you want, buy both. But buy it. Honestly this is still so good I feel the need to re-evaluate their later albums simply because for giving us this album I owe them that much.
Beautiful, harrowing and unflinching.
(Still10/10 Gizmo)
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