Day: May 29, 2017

Since we didn’t have the chance to talk about Damnatio Memoriae, eighth studio album of the English My Silent Wake, at the time of its release in 2015, we take the opportunity to do it briefly thanks to the vinyl reissue just released by Minotauro Records. The band founded by Ian Arkley in 2005 is one of the most prolific ever among those dedicated to death doom, a genre from which they have also departed several times, going to explore acoustic or ambient shores, as it happened, after all, in their recent release Invitation To Imperfection. Damnatio Memoriae remains, therefore, in chronological order, the last testimony of the genre mainly treated with good results by My Silent Wake; compared to the works of the past, the album exhibits more robust scores and several tracks in which, especially in the initial part, the sound appears very heavy and less devoted to the search of melancholic and painful melodies: when this happens, it comes out a magnificent track like And So It Comes To An End, but things are not bad even when the propulsive thrust seems to come from the first Paradise Lost and Anathema (with The Innocent that touches the sounds of The Silent Enigma). Excellent also the long The Empty Unknown, which shows coordinates more canonically doom, while it turns again on a gothic rather andante with Chaos Enfolds Me, track that closed the first draft of the disc and that, however, in the new one, is followed by the reproposition of And So It Comes To An End, Now It Destroys and Of Fury enriched by the keyboards of Simon Bibby: the songs in question do not change face much but, especially the last two, are pleasantly softened in this version. A useful and accurate reissue of Damnatio Memoriae, an album that with its release has consolidated the status acquired by My Silent Wake thanks to a long, productive and, at times, pleasantly unpredictable career.

2015 – Minotauro Records