Day: June 27, 2014

Interesting debut step for Necropolis, Italian band dedicated to a death doom with very experimental traits and definitely far from those airy melodies and tinged with melancholy that we are accustomed to hear. The two Roman musicians, Rodolfo Baroni and Dario Fabiani, have recruited David Unsaved of Ennui as vocalist to give life to an album that, as said, definitely can not be relegated to the status of a classic work of the genre: since the opener Ashes of My Soul, in fact, I shows its most disturbing face favoring dissonance and distortion on which the Georgian vocalist leans his excellent growl, in a sound context really far from the more melodic of his band. The rare harmonic semblances are overhung by a wall of merciless riffs, aimed at manifesting a state of total alienation with respect to earthly vicissitudes. The following Inner Space flows for a good part shaken by drone reverberations before a sharp death metal of rare effectiveness takes over the scene. Here the lead guitar plays in a more identifiable way its work for what proves to be definitely one of the qualitative peaks of the album. The same can be said for A Step, which is also a song with a substantially death structure but with more enjoyable traits than the previous one. Silence Awaits brings the album towards its epilogue, proving to be a very long test of resistance with which Necropolis literally subject the listener to a sort of psychophysical annihilation, which the noises and filtered voices of the short final track Curriculum Vitae certainly do not help to alleviate. I is a work objectively difficult to decipher, especially for those who would have expected something more devoted to the stylistic elements of death doom; frankly, without prejudice to the need to catalog “obtorto collo” every band and its albums, Necropolis put on the plate a particularly pronounced experimental vein that makes it undoubtedly peculiar proposal. I have some doubts, however, about the possibility that those who have appreciated, for example, just a band like Ennui can easily get in tune with a similar work, which really needs a certain tenacity to be able to finally grasp the true essence; I must confess that at least the first three or four listens have left me puzzled, but the feeling that the debut of Necropolis hid within it something that deserved to be explored without leaving any stone unturned, has encouraged me not to give up too soon. So much pleasant effort has been rewarded with the discovery of a new excellent Italian band able to propose an unconventional approach to extreme metal. 

2014 – Independent