Day: November 23, 2016

We had already been able to appreciate the compositional talent of Max Molodtsov on the occasion of the two 2014 Edenian releases, where under the nickname Eternal Tom he tried his hand at gothic doom with lots of female vocals, in the wake of Draconian. With this solo project, the Ukrainian musician can give vent to a character that leads him to approach the death doom of Swedish matrix, in the wake of When Nothing Remains (not coincidentally Peter Laustsen peeps in On Another’s Sorrow) and the Doom Vs. of that Johan Ericson, for Molodtsov, is certainly a model from the point of view of guitar, given the remarkable affinity of touch already highlighted in the work of Edenian. With these references and the already recognized first-rate technical skills to put on the plate, it was too easy to predict the success of this debut of Sorrowful Land: great melodies, beautiful guitar work, convincing vocals and atmospheres full of painful melancholy, nothing wrong, in short. If we really want to find the classic hair in the egg, Of Ruins… in some places could really be mistaken for a new album of When Nothing Remains, but in the end who cares, when fifty minutes of melodic death doom of the highest quality flow in the player: we fans of the genre essentially ask the musicians to excite us, and we gladly leave the search for the philosopher’s stone (in the form of originality) to those who have minds less simple and linear than ours. With the clues that I have provided, it seems superfluous to explain further the contents of the work: those who love the bands mentioned immerse themselves without delay in listening to the songs dripping with emotions contained in Of Ruins…

2016 – Solitude Productions