Month: September 2015

The brazilians HellLight reach, with Journey Through Endless Storm, the fifth long-distance stage in a career that began in the last century but, in fact, has taken shape and consistency from the debut album In Memory Of The Old Spirits, dated 2005. The band, led by vocalist and guitarist Fabio De Paula, had a rather slow but constant evolutionary process, passing from the naivety of the first two records (especially in the programmatic Funeral Doom) up to today’s completed form and almost perfect from the point of view of the construction of an evocative sound and at the same time compact and elegant. Compared to the already very good …And Then, The Light Of Consciousness Became Hell… and No God Above, No Devil Below, the new work doesn’t show any weaknesses (if we don’t want to consider it as a duration of almost eighty minutes) thanks to a uniform tracklist for the value of the single tracks and a clear improvement of De Paula’s clean vocals, an important element in the economy of HellLight‘s sound that, in the previous works, was proposed in a stentorian way but a bit too forced. Compared to the past production, we can’t help but notice how much a “saturnusation” of the sound has been realized, which is constantly disseminated with guitar melodies able to evoke atmospheres full of misty melancholy. The squaring in the circle found by HellLight is amply demonstrated by a tracklist devoid of weaknesses: uniform, of course, with a pouring rain as a background to the succession of various songs among which, however, there is none that does not deserve to be enjoyed in all its slow pace, with peaks of touching lyricism reached in the wonderful Time and Shapeless Forms Of Emptiness. Enveloping keyboards, a lead guitar that gives a profusion of painful solos and an effective growl, are the components that make us love out of all proportion a band like Saturnus and consequently all those, like HellLight, that from the Danish masters have taken inspiration, consciously or not. If we want to find a more precise term of comparison, however, the band from Paula today moves parallel to Johan Ericson’s Doom:VS, both for a more dramatic imprint, with more than one funeral element given to the sound, and for the already mentioned use of clean vocals that, only when they are appropriate as it happens in this work, turn out to be an added value and not a breaking element of the pathos created by the instrumental development. Journey Through Endless Storm is the album that greets the definitive entry of HellLight in the elite of the melodic funeral death doom, thanks to a sound inspired and clearly European but that contains within it, although it is never exhibited in a particularly explicit way, a sense of nostalgic abandonment typically Latin.

2015 – Solitude Productions