It is not easy to speak objectively about something or someone who at a certain stage of one’s life has marked or accompanied the most beautiful or the most difficult moments. This is precisely why for me reviewing an Ea album is always enjoyable on the one hand and tremendously complex on the other, in view of the fact that I cannot hide my boundless love for every note composed by this band. So with this review I can do nothing but try to convey the same feelings to those who will read me, with the hope of pushing as many people as possible to listen to this mysterious band. Evidently, beyond the affective aspect it is certainly not out of piety that one can praise the work of a band whose members’ identities are unknown and which has no website, no Facebook or MySpace page, nothing at all that would make the poor reviewer hope to receive the slightest feedback. What little we know from unofficial rumors is that they are said to be Russian musicians (but Solitude itself, which is based there, does not credit this claim), that Ea is the name of a deity from Akkadian Babylonian mythology, and that both the lyrics and the language used refer to these ancient civilizations. But these are after all marginal aspects because Ea is actually not a band, but rather a feeling that penetrates the soul, seeping into the mind with its melancholic notes led now by effective keyboard lines now by a guitar with a desolately dilated timbre. Indeed, the sound of these anonymous pain-singers does not possess the desperately claustrophobic traits and nihilistic attitude of Worship or the sense of inescapable tragedy that lurks behind every note composed by Colosseum. The ache of living in Ea is a cathartic event, where the sad pacing of the melodies sketches the slow consummation of existence until its extreme farewell, and the notes narrate its melancholic flow leaving a feeling of soft melancholy rather than despondency and consternation. This episode in their discography, the fourth in six years, is the logical continuation of the previous ones, although in emotional intensity it is closer to Ea II than to Ea Taesse and Au Ellai: the small new element lies in having chosen to present a single forty-eight-minute track instead of dividing the composed music into two or three tracks as usual. What really impresses is the ability exhibited by these musicians in touching the right chords of emotion without resorting to any particular virtuosity or even exhibiting any out-of-the-ordinary technique. The band’s greatness is exalted precisely in their extreme compositional simplicity, that which leads some bangs of critics to snub them because they are the architects of solutions that are not sufficiently cerebral for those who delight in the exercise of intellectual snobbery. Ea have created an entirely personal path to funeral doom, beaten recently even by the excellent Comatose Vigil with their splendid Fuimus… Not Sumus, although it would not be honest to ignore that everyone who tries their hand at this genre has to reckon with the inevitable influences of Thergothon first and Skepticism later. This music is certainly not for those who seek avant-garde novelties or assorted noises peddled as the new frontier of extreme music; on the contrary, it is essential nourishment for those who are content to be moved by the melancholy soundtrack of an existence inevitably destined for oblivion.
2012 – Solitude Productions
Mournful Sounds 
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