In approaching the umpteenth Russian band dedicated to death doom you can’t help but notice that, for once, behind them there is not the longa manus of Solitude Productions. In fact, Human Collapse self-produce their debut album but, undoubtedly, the quality of the proposal does not seem to suffer at all from this particular, since an excellent recording and a songwriting of certain thickness make Darkness To Fall a work worthy of the utmost attention. Another small element of discontinuity is the fact that the proposal does not come from the Moscow scene but from St. Petersburg, even if the two Russian musicians involved (Igor Maslov and Egor Lappo) are helped on vocals by the Ukrainian Andrey Tkachenko, whose skills we have already had the opportunity to appreciate on the occasion of the Vin De Mia Trix album. Melancholy the right amount and marked by a valuable guitar work by Maslov, Darkness To Fall is well above the sufficiency thanks to good songs such as Ellipsis and Novembersmile and the more varied and sometimes evocative title track placed in closing. In the three quarters of an hour at their disposal, Human Collapse show excellent potentialities and also the rest of the lot has the great merit of being quite usable, thanks to brilliant melodic intuitions; it should be noted, moreover, the use of several piano passages, very well performed by the same Igor Maslov, which are successfully placed as an alternative to the atmospheric keyboard scores. While remaining within the scope of the usual stylistic coordinates, which take their cue from the ubiquitous Swallow The Sun, the melodic death doom of Human Collapse fits perfectly in the context of a scene, such as the Russian-Ukrainian one, which has now assumed such dimensions as to be rightly considered a school in its own right; Darkness To Fall is, in fact, yet another good record coming from those lands and, for this very reason, can no longer be a surprise.

2014 – Independent