So now it's a terrible certainty: The Music of DISSECTION has nothing in common anymore with their tremendous masterpieces in the nineties. Since we have already known Maha Kali from the single and the rebirth gigs, everyone knew that the band would not go into the direction fans of the old records had been hoping for. But somehow, there was still a touch of hope that Maha Kali would not be representative for the whole new album or at least that the old days would sound through some passages. But now we can bury our hopes. Reinkaos turns out as a collection of terribly boring riffs, accompanied by very melodic leads that are rather unspectacular as well. The music is somewhere between melodic Death Metal, modern staccato-riffs and elements of traditional metal. It already makes the listener happy when it gets a little faster (as, for example, in Xeper-I-Set), but these moments are rather rare. Only Jon Nödtveidt's voice alone still spreads the enthusiasm of the old days, as you can hear from the opener Beyond Horizon. Obviously he's really behind what he does, so let's better not talk about the whining leads in Starless Aeon. Mr. Nödtveidt can sing about dark and anti-cosmic gods as much as he wants – in the music, there's unfortunately no malignancy at all. The title track, an instrumental song, builds up some eager expectations, even coming up with a melody that reminds of the great times (but only for a few seconds) – and then? Then the torrential river one has been hoping for turns out to be a thin brook, getting thinner and thinner and petering out at the end. If a well-done (yet everything but sensational) Swedish Death Metal song like Infernal Fire already is one of the highlights; if it's one of the best things about the album that one can say that the album version of Maha Kali sounds better than the single version, then you better don't think of legendary songs like Night's Blood, Thorns Of Crimson Death, The Somberlain or Unhallowed, if you don't want to start crying. Somewhere in the back of my brain I still have a shade of hope that Reinkaos will get the same place in DISSECTION's history that the horrible Projector got in the history of Dark Tranquillity and that the Swedes will recover from this phase as their fellow countrymen did (to some extent). But for now, we got an album one can describe as “something between average and good”, but for a band that wrote songs as the ones I mentioned above, it's a declaration of creative bankruptcy.