There are no limits in metal anymore. The meteoric rise of Nightwish and Apocalyptica, the growing attention surrounding acts like Unexpect and Stolen Babies is proof, all of them acts – to name but a few – that have taken established metal requirements and put their own unique spin on things. Add Sweden’s Diablo Swing Orchestra to this list, a band that initially caught BW&BK;’s attention via MySpace with samples from their debut album, The Butcher’s Ballroom, and has since been recognized on an international scale. The D:S:O sound is an unexpectedly infectious mutation of metal coupled with swing, jazz, symphonic and oriental elements, resulting in an album that is about as anti-genre-specific as you can get.

“For me the inspiration lies within my musical background,” explains founder/guitarist Daniel Håkansson. “My mother was an aspiring opera singer when she was young and she has sung in choirs all her life. So I was brought up listening to a lot of operas and choir works. When I later in life picked up the guitar I got into rock and metal music, only to rediscover classical music once again a little further down the line. So the basic idea for this band was pretty clear from the start – it was just a matter of combining the two worlds. I was quite inexperienced with recording when we started and had only done a few demo sessions prior to the album. The different genres used within a song sometimes left us without any good references on how it could be done sound-wise, so basically it was a lot of trial and error. We do feel as if the hard work paid off and we have a much clearer vision of what we want to do with the next album.”

Right out of the box comparisons have been made to Nightwish thanks to vocalist Annalouice Loegdlund’s performance, which stands tall beside ex-Nightwish singer Tarja Turunen’s earlier, more operatic recordings on the band’s Oceanborn and Wishmaster albums.

“To tell the truth I’d never heard of Nightwish or any other band combining opera singing and metal/rock when we started out in 2003,” says Håkansson, “so it seems we got on a bandwagon we didn’t know existed at the time. Therefore, I wouldn’t say that those kind of bands have had so much of an influence on our music and sound. However, we should really give them credit for opening up the eyes of the public to the combination opera singing and metal music, because when we came along our sound wasn’t totally ‘out there’. Although the connection has been made we haven’t been written of as just another clone. On the contrary people seem to think that we bring something fresh to the genre.”
“We certainly don’t bend over backwards to have an avant-garde approach to writing and arranging the songs,” he adds. “We just want to show that there still a lot to be done within a rock and metal context which is fairly unexplored. I consider our music to be fairly easy listening in comparison to many other metal bands. I do, however, enjoy that kind of more technical music, I’m not just very good at writing it.”

For the record, all instruments on The Butcher’s Ballroom except the harp, trombones and Hammond are real. Violin, cello, sitar and trumpets, at one time considered to have no place in metal, are all part of the D:S:O arsenal and accepted as such by the fans.

“I must say that it has been quite overwhelming,” Håkansson of D:S:O’s acceptance. “It seems there are a lot of people with an open mind when it comes to music because the response has been really good inside and outside the metal community. The fact that we have humour as an ingredient in the songs kind of balances the somewhat pretentious approach in some of the songs. We seem to get away with some bombastic arrangements since we have elements in the music that show we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We do however take the music very serious, and I guess people pick up on that.”

So much so that D:S:O has found themselves travelling lines similar to Apocalyptica, being accepted by both metal and non-metal crowds.

“One common comment has been ‘I usually don’t listen to metal but I find this music awesome,” Håkansson reveals. “With comments like that we feel as if we have achieved something worth building on in the future. I also know that we have gotten some metalheads hooked on swing music, which is inspiring.”