The two Candlemas albums featuring Bjorn Flodkvist on lead vocals are an unexpected treat. This is a weird backwater in the band's timeline. When last we left our heroes, in 1994, they were near the end of the line with an album that I suspected was engineered for mass appeal, but failed both financially (according to Wikipedia) and aesthetially (according to me, though its rating on Metallum is right in line with their other albums). The band broke up for a time. Leif wandered off to form a new band (Abstrakt Algebra, clean and a little proggy) before recording Dactylis Glomerata (that's a kind of grass--a weed if you will) under the Candlemass banner in 1998. The band now features the drummer and keyboard player from the Abstrakt Algebra album, with the addition of Mike Amott (Arch Enemy) on guitar and Bjorn on vocals.
And it's fucking great. On Dactylis it's clear they're tapping into the thrashy and spacy elements of Sabbath as much as the doom proper. While Bjorn has pipes, I feel it's less in the Dio camp than doing Ozzy if Ozzy had pipes. Though a departure from their signature sound, parts are prophetic of sounds to come--the solo on "Wiz" sounds like Iommi's guest solo on the octopus song, "I Still See The Black" is an earlier version of "Black as Time" and "Dustflow" might the be first use of the compound coinages Lars uses sometimes (like "Clearsight" on King). The back half is a little bit of a let down for me, as it is getting a bit into kind of a gothy-prog sound that doesn't work for me. To my ears, these songs ("Abstrakt Sun" and "Apathy" for example) are a bit more what Abstrakt Algebra sounded like, though I didn't listen to that project much.
The very next year, they lost the keyboard player and got a new guitarist. The album From the 13th Sun is "dedicated to the greatest band of all time, Black Sabbath," but they really didn't need to because it's all over the place. Bjorn is still doing a competent Ozzy (a reimagining of Ozzy as a competent singer, not an ok impersonation. Right from the opener "Droid," Bjorn leans a bit more into the adenoidal sound. Each song features Butlerian lyrics about outerspace in the mode of "Into the Void"; the tolling bells opening "Tot" conjure up the song "Black Sabbath"; the list goes on down to shafting the keyboard player (Carl Westholm is their Dan Airey; he has kept playing with them up to the present day). Ironically, this homage to the foundational doom band that was the whole genre's inspiration sounds the least like the Candlemass sound. At this point, they have entirely left their signature epic doom sound. But that's not really a bad thing
So I'm not sure how to rank these two. I mention of sort of lull on Dactylis, but 13th Sun is pretty much a Sabbath pastiche. I guess that gives Dactylis a slight edge, but I'll listen to both of these more in the future. Looking back over the list, I think there's five that I'd listen to again and six I'm unlikely to, so that's a pretty good concentration for what seemed the band's lowest point.
Postscript:
The bonus disk of Dactylis includes many of the same songs in earlier versions, with one Mats Leven on vocals. My rationale for not including him on the roll of singers is this: Not only is this a bonus disk, but it was initially intended to be Abstrakt Algebra II, i.e., an entirely different band. Admittedly, there are two Candlemas EPs with Mats singing, but that's outside my purview. Notably, Mats sang live with the band from 2012-2018 as well as in 2006. If that's right (Metallum sees it differently) he is actually the longest serving singer for the band.
Incidentally, Metallum lists Tony Martin as the vocalist in 2014, though he never recorded with the band. I guess that makes him the the Ray Gillan of Candlemass, while Bjorn is the Tony Martin. (This is a labored and inaccurate analogy requiring detailed knowledge of and undue appreciation of mid-to-late-80s Black Sabbath albums. But if you actually read this far, it's not unreasonable to think you might have that.)
