Day: May 31, 2016

A remarkable work, although of complex assimilation, this first full length of the Swedish Seedna. The Scandinavians are the authors of an interesting blend of black and post metal imbued with a constant dramatic vein that is not expressed, however, through touching melodies, as for an impact that can impress a pain more dull than acute. The same photography to which ours resort in the promotional phase leads to an introspective imaginary that is well suited to mysterious and annihilating themes, such as those concerning what awaits each of us after death. I must confess that this review has been one of the most difficult to write, inducing me several times to postpone the arduous task of describing Forlorn, because of its not easy decryption. What emerges with certainty, after an examination too much depth, is the impression of being in the presence of a work of rare depth, in which ambient, doom and post metal meet, without overlapping, creating a flow of sound that can not be liquidated with four words of circumstance. This first work of Seedna forces us to change our relationship with music, to which most people assign a simplistic playful function: Forlorn rather induces us to think, to interpenetrate with sounds that do not make discounts at the melodic level if not rarely, letting to guide the listening is a dramatic hint that, unlike what happens with the funeral doom, does not find outlet in a cathartic sense but instead leaves a sense of consternation, given the impossibility (or perhaps the refusal?) to understand what awaits us in a future that never appeared so dark and threatening. In this continuum that is Forlorn, stands the long Wander with its magnificent 22 minutes of summa composition of Seedna, even if, personally, I think that Abyss is the real key to reading the work, with its sounds that, especially in the second half, appear an ideal transposition in an extreme sense of the mood that pervaded one of the masterpieces of the evil of living translated into music, which was Pornography by The Cure. In short, we are in the presence of a great album that leaves different sensations after each listening, so even these lines should be taken with the benefit of inventory: tomorrow, pervaded by a different state of mind, I could tweak or rectify many of the evaluations and feelings just expressed, and maybe that’s where the beauty lies.

2016 – Transcending Obscurity Records