Unanimated - In the Forest of the Dreaming Dead (1993)

   As the death metal wave exhausted from ideas, many bands drifted into progressive and technical direction in the struggle to create something new or they completely changed their style. A few bands like Unanimated debuted with something else by mixing the actual underground trends.
   To turn death metal melodic wasn't ordinary that time, the band counts as one of the heralds of this style, which created a paradox by skeletonizing the genre from it's main features. But unlike the melodic death bands of Göteborg, Unanimated stayed at the heavy riff centric song structures and didn't try to build the whole concept around melodies that are so catchy as it's possible. The slowly uprising shadow of the Norwegian black metal scene had a strong influence on their music and the lyrics about mysterious dark forces and melancholic topics are also evident references. But in this case not the sizzling sound gave the occasional atmosphere, but some '80s heavy metal influences which turned this album to a bridge between the old school style and the actual modern trends in extreme metal. It sounds like they "dreamed" these following trends shortly before their wider spreading.