Almost five years after the good long-distance debut Leaving The Place Forgotten By God, the Ukrainian Embrace Of Silence come back with their excellent death doom. At the time I defined that album as a successful operation, as all things considered not even too derivative and dependent on the heavy influences of the bands of reference of the genre: this judgment also applies to the new Where Darkness Swallow The Sun, in which the style of the group assumes even sharper contours, although free from any innovative temptation. The album unfolds along a series of tracks from the darkly melodic pace, with a look turned more to the North American school than to the Scandinavian one, then, to be synthetic, more akin to Daylight Dies than to Swallow The Sun, although the title of the album may suggest otherwise: the success of the whole, then, contributes decisively to the dramatic touch that is the imprint of many bands from the former USSR. In a context of good quality compactness stand out the title track, quite lively for rhythms and melodic solutions, and the wonderful In The Embrace Of The Stygian River, marked by an excellent guitar work that outlines a really poignant main theme. Just the six strings take total control of the situation, thanks to the substantial renunciation of keyboards, which were instead used more generously in Leaving The Place Forgotten By Gods: this makes the sound certainly more rocky and dry without losing, however, the typical painful connotations indeed, perhaps giving it a greater incisiveness. Where Darkness Swallow The Sun is attested on a medium-high level, maybe not on the same level of the masterpieces that the genre churns out with good regularity, but certainly of great substance and pleasant listening; as for other bands in the industry, the very dilated time between one release and another help to keep warm the name, so a new release in a slightly shorter time could have a double value, to fix in the minds of fans the moniker Embrace Of Silence, as well as the possibility to accelerate that further leap in quality that seems to be in the ropes of the valid Ukrainian band.

2017 – Fono Ltd.