Atom, a solo project of Fabio, a musician from Cesena, reaches its second long-distance act after the debut last year with Waiting for the End. Horizons turns out to be an album definitely rich in interesting ideas, confirming the fact that, often, works dedicated to black metal and produced in total autarky give surprising results, despite all the objective limits that may arise from such a condition. Just the fact of succeeding in proposing a work without particular tension drops in the arc of its three quarters of an hour duration, denotes good compositional skills and, although moving in a very crowded musical environment, it is appreciable in particular a certain personal imprint given by Fabio to the different tracks. As a matter of fact, Atom‘s black music is stylistically and rhythmically inspired by the Scandinavian one, enriching it with a melodic taste that is always in the foreground: thanks to this, the latent misanthropic sense that hovers in the songs is diluted in more melancholic moods that, more than once, cross the border into depressive, thus creating a flow of sound always balanced between these two souls. For my personal taste, I really appreciated both the opening track External Spectator and, above all, the central couple formed by Hazy Dreams, with its enthralling guitar melody, and The Cold Eternal Light, where the guitar gives valuable arpeggios, in which the musician from Romagna probably manages to focus his intentions at best. Less convincing, instead, is a song like Atheist Manifesto, just because it partially exits from the sound coordinates expressed in the mentioned episodes, resulting not very functional to the context of the work, while an aspect on which there would be to make some corrections, also in the production phase, are certainly the vocals: the scream is too much croaking in some moments, revealing to be stylistically suitable to the desperate traits of the most uncompromising depressive, rather than to the less exasperated sounds in this sense contained in Horizons. If it’s true that in black you don’t go looking for beautiful singing, it would be equally desirable in the future the use of a less harsh and maybe partially intelligible vocal style, also considering the good quality of the lyrics. A venial sin that invalidates, however, in small part the satisfactory performance of an album that highlights a new stimulating solo project from the underground extreme tricolor.

2014 – Independent