MALADIE – The Dance Of Tragedies

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7.0

• Bands:
  SICKNESS
• Duration: 01:10:48
• Available from: 05/29/2026
• Label:

• Apostasy Records

To understand Maladie you have to make an effort and enter their world: for fifteen years now the Germans have been churning out records with astonishing assiduity, in a genre that they themselves define as 'plague metal', and they don't care about fashions and trends, continuing undaunted on their way without a precise destination, dispersed in an underground niche from which they will hardly escape.
In the last five years, alongside mammoth works such as “Wound Of Gods” or “For We Are The Plague”, the Rhineland group has produced more streamlined works, such as the latest episodes of the EP series “Symptoms” and “The Sick Is Dead – Long Live The Sick”: a chaos of heterogeneous and unclassifiable publications within which it is impossible to orient oneself and from which it is difficult to understand the moves of the group, which does not seem to follow a thread logical but only one's instinct of the moment.

“The Dance Of Tragedies” belongs to the first category, that of the most impressive albums, and, if for a band that releases forty-minute EPs a seventy-minute album does not seem strange, we can say that, in terms of content, the proposal is no less risky.
It is certainly not music to be listened to distractedly and in small doses, but a fluid composition with its own global meaning, which embraces different styles and goes beyond conventional structures: only faint traces of the black metal of a few years ago remain, identifiable above all in the scream singing which occasionally joins the clean voice, and gives way to rock, progressive, classic metal, doom, chamber music, jazz, even a short rap interlude.
There is, as always, the saxophone, which is not a simple frill but an instrument in the foreground, there are violins and cellos and, this time, also the didgeridoo, characterized by an unpredictability which represents its best quality when it remains so and its greatest flaw when it results in useless verbosity.

Playing over the top is a constant of Maladie, and so here are the dance rhythms driven by the keyboards of the crazy “Embrace Our Curse”, the prog rock of “Too Old To Die” which, without any warning, explodes into a punk rock chorus, the title track which recklessly combines ska, piano and blast-beat: unexpectedly there is a certain underlying coherence, but also moments in which the sextet seems to lose the thread, like the exhausting coda of “The Unknowable”.

“The Dance Of Tragedies” was born from an approach to composition that could be compared to that of Sigh in the second part of their career, a cauldron of frenzy and chaos, but also elegance and intensity, which is not easy to evaluate objectively.
As we have noticed, not everything works perfectly and, alongside bold but successful intuitions, there are some empty passages and some naivety, which are physiological in such a long and multifaceted album: it would probably have been enough to reduce each piece by a couple of minutes to obtain a result equal to the effort made, but Maladie have always been like this and their nature will not change at this point in their now long journey.