Really tasty this second album of the Russian one man band Lauxnos, a project born in 2013 by the will of the multi-instrumentalist Kataros. This young musician, involved for years in various bands in which he had to bear the weight of the composition and arrangement of the songs, he thought it might as well do everything by himself, giving up in fact only the live activity. Lauxnos is an entity that is defined as post-metal, thanks to the fact that today we tend to abuse this label saving, attributable to anyone who does not follow a well-defined musical genre: in fact, in The Last Pier we find different shades that start from a black matrix, although not too marked, passing through the depressive, doom, gothic, with a progressive coating that enhances without attenuating the mood of the melancholy proposal. Kataros is a good guitarist, not so much because he is a virtuoso of the instrument, but for his ability to weave touching melodies that are well suited to the concept of the album, a continuation of the previous My Dead Ocean: The Last Pier is the second part of an introspective journey that makes its own all the metaphors related to the immensity of the ocean. The Russian factotum has only one external help, that of Rain Prahlada, which provides a valuable contribution to the success of the album with its clean vocals in the mother tongue, the scream of Kataros marks the harshest parts of the album, in particular the black-oriented title track, or acts as a counterbalance to the more evocative voice of Rain, as happens in excellent songs and full of valuable guitar melodies such as Dolphin’s Tale and Gale Force 9. The Last Pier is a beautiful record, yet another jewel pushed out of the Russian borders by the appreciable work of Nihil Art Records: it’s clear that compared to us, who receive (with much pleasure) this material in order to review it, the average fan has much less chance to come across these works produced and composed with all the chrisms by almost unknown bands and one of our “missions”, in the end, is just to promote this kind of meeting.

2015 – Deleting Soul Records / Nihil Art Records