A few months after the release of the excellent Fade Away Gradually, My Hope… of Misere Nobis, we find Gris and Torpor struggling with a new project called Dreariness. Our do not flatten on the positions of the mother band but present, with My Mind Is Too Weak To Forget, an intriguing mix of depressive sounds, post rock and shoegaze, trying to subtract to Alcest their most dreamy atmospheres making them plunge into a sort of nightmare with no possibility of awakening, and replacing the voice of Neige with the desperate and excruciating scream of the vocalist Tenebra: this, roughly, is the description of what to expect from this work of Dreariness. Surely the use of the voice in this album will be for some a sort of borderline: there will be those who will appreciate the musical content but will probably not be able to accept an interpretation of the scream matrix depressive even more extreme than usual, on the contrary, those who will try to overcome this barrier will find as a deserved reward the opportunity to fully enjoy the emotional atmosphere of My Mind Is Too Weak To Forget. Being the latter my case, I can confirm that the performance of Tenebra is really excellent for its effectiveness in adequately conveying the pain and the sense of existential discomfort enclosed in the lyrics and sounds shared with their fellow adventurers. As said, the combination of atmospheres, to which we can attribute the label of depressive blackgaze, takes place in a natural way, so much so that the whole work seems not to be affected even by a considerable duration (over an hour), keeping always alive the emotional tension that finds, however, one of its highest expressions in the long title track placed at the end. In short, although listening to My Mind Is Too Weak To Forget turns out to be anything but a walk, with the fading of its last notes the first impulse that comes is to dive again in these atmospheres fascinating and disturbing at the same time, proving the value of this excellent album.

2013 – Independent