Day: January 10, 2015

Doom, in its most extreme and melancholic forms, appears to me more and more as a metaphor for the life-death cycle, something that, for those who believe in reincarnation, for example, could be repeated ad infinitum. In fact, this is a genre that, when one discovers and eviscerates until the residual musical stilla the last in chronological order of the many wonderful bands that take turns in our stereo, it seems to no longer have the resources to reproduce such painful beauty until some other carnage appears on the scene, making the magic start again. This is the case with Exgenesis, an intercontinental duo that puts the voice of Colombian Alejandro Lotero at the service of Swedish musician Jari Lindholm (who is also involved in another similar-sounding project, Enshine, where the vocalist is Frenchman Sebastien Pierre). The result of this collaboration is a magnificent ep, which proposes at its highest levels the best of Scandinavian and American death doom, the one that belongs to Swallow The Sun on the one hand and Daylight Dies on the other, but this is obviously a trivial example aimed at understanding, in broad terms, what are the contents of the work. In reality, Aphotic Veil is much more than a skilful reproduction of what has already been heard: in just under half an hour, Exgenesis marvels at the depth of the sound, the perfection of the melodic lines, the rare but effective accelerations and the controlled brutality of the growl of a surprising Alejandro Lotero. Jari Lindholm, for his part, proves to be a musician of above average level: in Cloudburst the sound is harsh, full of tension, while in Concrematio the melodies that just before smouldered under the ashes emerge in all their dazzling magnificence. The instrumental title track is an exhibition of class and competence by the Swedish musician and preludes to Futile Horizon, a song with sometimes dreamy traits even if slightly less effective than the rest of a red dot tracklist, in which the final Noctua is the absolute pearl: perhaps the most swallowian among the tracks, also for the alternating growl scream of Lotero, in typical Kotamäki style, and for the constant production of poignant melodies by a lead guitar capable of touching the innermost chords of the soul, allowing Noctua, the owl with the third eye depicted on the cover, to continue its search in flight inside us. A record to which, I confess, I approached absent-mindedly, dispersed in the flood of material that I find myself listening to in this period, until, after two or three listenings, it literally exploded in my eardrums refreshing the heart and the spirit thanks to its beauty, that I can’t define unexpected just by virtue of what I wrote in the initial lines, about the most exciting musical genre that has ever been given to us by the gods in charge.

2015 – Rain Without End Records / Naturmacht Productions