Day: February 7, 2017

After a demo from 2014, Marianas Rest is back with this excellent first full length full of melancholic moods. The death doom of a Finnish band can never disregard what Swallow The Sun has already done, but from this remarkable base those who have talent can move with greater ease looking for the ideal compositional solutions. Compared to other bands in the sector, Marianas Rest seem to lean towards a more obscure melodic death, or at least this is the impression given by the more animated tracks, expressing their sorrowful feelings in some key tracks in the middle of the tracklist. Interspersed with dramatic samples, the tracks oscillate between rhythms that, remaining in the Land of the Thousand Lakes, can bring back to Insomnium (not surprisingly, in Nadir their vocalist Niilo Sevänen lends his voice) and, indeed, moments defined more properly death doom, which in my opinion represent the peaks of the album, responding to gems of shining pain such as For The Heartless and A Lonely Place To Die. This first work of Marianas Rest strikes for its compositional maturity and, above all, for the pursuit without delay of a very precise goal, that of proposing a melancholic and dramatic sound but at the same time rich in airy openings endowed with a certain liveliness; as said, the result is excellent and, frankly, it’s difficult to find a single defect in an album that involves from the first to the last note, thanks to an approach that always puts in the foreground a strong melodic sense. In a remarkable overall performance, a note of merit goes to the good vocal interpretation of Jaakko Mäntymaa and the measured and elegant keyboard work of Aapo Koivisto, the best known of this group of musicians thanks to his militancy in the excellent Omnium Gatherum. Horror Vacui is the umpteenth, amazing album of death doom born in Finland, a land where the seed that bears such sounds continues to proliferate.

2016 – Sliptrick Records