We are now at the end of this year, winter is taking its due place in the continuous cycle of the seasons, the colors fade away, and the darkness accompanies us through the coldest months: a perfect season, full of leaden atmospheres that tempt us to listen to works with melancholic, introspective, dark connotations. In our help comes the beloved metal world that, with its various genres has to keep us company when the days are short and the sadness accompanies the desire to escape from the outside world, maybe listening to dreamy and melancholic works such as Autumn Requiem of the Polish Mortual. Ambitious work that of the band from Trzebenica, a concept focused on the life and introspective battles of a poet and, for this reason, very dramatic, operatic and dreamy. Anything but monotonous, the album musically consists of an excellent mixture of various genres, from the most extreme like black death in the most dramatic parts, to dark gothic in the many exciting passages where the sounds slow down to make you dream, with excellent classical interventions never pompous. The changing atmospheres make this work difficult to categorize and the average long songs make it a disc to be savored slowly, to make our all the various facets that make up a very mature songwriting for a band at the beginning. Beautiful are the countless piano interventions and the use of voices, which go from growl to recited to the excellent female voice (Marta Wolak), elegant, delicate and equally dark. Continuous and repeated changes of time, give to Autumn Requiem that touch of prog that raises the quality of a really beautiful work, exciting, at least for those who, of the atmospheres of which the work is full, appreciate the enormous poetic potential, cloaked in a melancholy that at times becomes tragic as the themes of which the young and imaginary poet becomes a worry (love, death, faith). More than an hour of music that is a journey into the ego of the protagonist but that could very well be ours, at least the one of those who have the sensitivity to deal with topics too often left in suspense to chase the everyday life, leaving our true essence at the mercy of the thousands of problems of a life often made of an exasperating superficiality. Among the tracks, magnificent are the sixteen minutes of The Crucible: Prologue, Rainy Ballad and the long and fascinating title track; the whole album turns out to be of absolute level and Mortual are definitely a band with huge potentialities, maybe improvable in the harder parts, but perfect in the atmospheric ones.
Do yourself a favor, listen to them.

2014 – Independent