Month: December 2016

A little more than two years ago, when I found myself talking about the debut album of Crypt Of Silence, Beyond Shades, I expressed myself in a non-enthusiastic way towards the work of the Ukrainian band, while evaluating it in the end positively, as it seemed to me too flattened on positions similar to those of the first Mourning Beloveth, but without possessing the same melodic and dramatic impact. Today, the Irish band is always the North Star for the young band of the east, but the leap in quality that I hoped, also trusting in the innate flair of Solitude Productions in finding talent, happened: Awareness Ephemera is a work that reflects in many ways its predecessor, with four long songs for a total duration of around fifty minutes, but the difference is all the incisiveness of the writing. In fact, the sorrowful and slow pace of Longest Winter, from the very first notes makes it clear how much Crypt Of Silence have learned the lesson in the best way, wrapping every note of the pathos necessary to captivate and convince the potential listeners: the lethal mix between My Dying Bride, Mourning Beloveth and Daylight Dies (evoked by the latter especially in Insignificant Sense) takes shape unrolling painfully, with rhythms that often become asphyxiating pushing the boundaries of the funeral, particularly in the pachydermic Life Passed By. It’s the wonderful Meridian, however, the track that closes the album, to photograph in the clearest way the current status of Crypt Of Silence, which descend fearlessly on the same ground of their masters from across the Channel, approaching them not a little if not even equaling them at times; Of course, the stylistic contiguity is always very marked and this is, perhaps, the only forgivable flaw of a beautiful album regardless, because to record songs of this thickness is not enough to be just good copyists, but you must have the right amount of talent. The task that we entrust to the Ukrainian guys, at the next occasion, will only be, therefore, to make us say “they sound like … Crypt Of Silence“, because we say quietly that the death doom proposed in Awareness Ephemera is unassailable for potential and emotional impact, which is not at all little for those who feed on this musical genre.

2016 – Solitude Productions