Positive long-distance debut of the Ukrainians Embrace Of Silence, grappling with a death doom of a classic matrix, with obvious references to the masters of the genre. The fact that the previous ep was a collection of covers that began with just two My Dying Bride songs makes it easy to guess the kind of sound contained within Leaving The Place Forgotten By God. However, unlike what has been done recently by labelmates Graveflower, the Izmail-born band does not so faithfully reproduce the sound of the British masters but rather follows a slightly more personal line, both in the alternating use of growl and scream, thus avoiding the suffering Stainthorpe-style clean vocals, and above all in the less introspective and melancholic and certainly more direct sounds. Not that cheerfulness reigns supreme here, of course: the mood is appropriate to the genre proposed but, rather than using mournful notes of violin or piano, the Ukrainian guys build their songs on effective guitar lines. The agreeable choice of offering a work with a duration of less than three quarters of an hour makes listening to Leaving The Place Forgotten By God less complex, making the music flow smoothly and always enjoyable. All of the tracks are well above a wide sufficiency but, among them, the excellent Way To Salvation, with its skillful alternation between accelerations and slowdowns, always marked by punchy melodies, and the closing track I’m Your Jesus, in which the guitars again stand out as absolute protagonists, must be mentioned. A really good album, all in all less derivative than many others I happened to review recently in the doom sphere, which deserves more than a distracted listen from fans of the genre. Embrace Of Silence: a name to keep an eye on in the near future.

2012 – Solitude Productions