Official cassette first press!!
There is a lot going on in this album, and it isn’t entirely bad. But it is surely not groundbreaking either. I got this from the Metal Maniacs online store and almost hit STOP and deleted the whole damn thing, since the intro really just. Does. Not. Fit. I don’t know what I’m listening to on the intro—it’s like the score to the Gonnies, Yanni, and some band on the Wyndham Hill label, WTH?
Alas, I persisted, and kept listening.
Is there any hope after this? Well, with an electronic base line and piano playing some off-beat version “I smell the blood of an English man”, I just about stopped this whole charade. But then the tortured, black metal voice careens over the top of this farcical undertone. Does it make it better? No. Bearable? Yes. And then we have some female whispering the typical fantasy gibberish—free your mind and bla bla, fly to some enchanted, something. Then all babbling in Italian. Whatever. While the electronic baseline bops away with this Yanni-ish humdrum. Then the black metal voice again. Huh.
Wow.
Then we are launched into straight-ahead black metal. Well, for awhile, then we have to let that lady to sing in Italian again. But the Yanni shit is gone. Track 3 comes at you almost like a 1349/Opera IX hybrid, and it’s actually damned good, with enough of the black metal feasting, and the melodic, semi-tranquil female singing to keep it in balance.
From there the album seems to open into a semblance of a direction, where we are allowed to have some breathers before onslaughts, and onslaughts after breathers. These are both in the form of short songs stuck in between, and within the songs themselves. True, there are some folky passages here, but it has a real gothic vibe to it, that is cut through with the tortured black metal vocals and riffage. You are taken on a very interesting and very unique journey here.
It is not all good, however, and from time to time the Yanni shit slips in and it sounds like I’m in the bookstore at a science museum. Part of that is the synths and the drum machine. They list a drummer, but that must be programming, or he’s playing a—never mind, I have no fucking clue. Sure sounds like a drum machine to me. Anyway. For those who just want the black/gothic shit, stick with Tracks 3, 6, 9, 11 (nice blackish folk here).
Track 8 tries to be a ballad, and the music—a lush piano line—tries to be too. But the vocalist is speaking Italian at 100mph and it just doesn’t fit at all. Sure, I like variations in music (e.g., double-bass drumming and triplets played retardando), but this really doesn’t work for me.
Do yourself a favor and skip to Track 3, and start from there. This is a halfway decent slice of gothic, black, folk, something-or-other that will appeal to those who want to take a very strange journey. Think of Cemetery of Scream here... not earth-shattering, but not completely worthless either. The folk influence comes out in Track 10, even it is all synth, I can still smell the rains in the Veneto—the track is fairly OK at conveying this feeling. The last track (I will not count the outro) is really a fine slab of black folk that is nice and dirty, and actually a little finer compliment to Tyr or Suidakra—nice rhythms, blasting, and growling. And Yanni again is there on the outro.
Giving it a 69, because while part of it is pleasurable, and you mostly have a nice taste in your mouth, your nose is still awfully close to ass.
Sample: youtube.com/watch?v=CvX9X42lYSE&list=RDCvX9X42lYSE&start_radio=1
