If it may be useless to remark how Finland is, by detachment, the home of the darkest and most melancholic sounds, it is not at all useless to continue to praise the quality that the various bands from the land of a thousand lakes, struggling with funeral death doom, offer at each release. In this case, the work under consideration is the third of Red Moon Architect, born in 2011 as a solo project of the talented Saku Moilanen and then transformed over time in a full-fledged band: Concealed Silence (2012), in fact, saw credited only the musician of Koivolua with the help of several guests, among which the only vocalist Anni Viljanen remained to constitute the trait of union between that work and subsequent ones of the band, obviously together with his mastermind. If Fail, released in 2015, consolidated the value and status of Red Moon Architect, this new Return Of The Black Butterflies has all the credentials to further raise the level of the Finnish band and bring it to fill a certain void left by Draconian, after the turn towards softer sounds implemented by the latter in the last decade. Of course, compared to the Swedish band, ours go more frequently to shores close to funeral, but the combination of Viljanen’s female voice and the growl of the newcomer Ville Rutanen automatically brings us back to that area, having in common the same dramatic and evocative sense that distinguished the first works of Johan Ericsson’s creature. Saku Moilanen confirms himself as a composer of great thickness, offering fifty minutes of leaden sounds but soaked in sorrowful melodies that, as per script, assume dramatic features in coincidence with the growl and then open melancholically with the entrance of the female voice. This makes us understand that there is nothing new to expect but, paradoxically, this aspect reveals itself as the cornerstone on which Red Moon Architect erect their magnificent monument to the pain that, however, never assumes a monotonous aspect because, even among the small deviations allowed by the genre, the oppressive funeral exhibited in a masterful way in End Of Days is, for example, very different from both the gothic of Tormented and the atmospheric doom of NDE. Return Of The Black Butterflies marks another masterful test by the Finnish band, now more than ever in the ranks of the best realities of the genre.

2017 – Inverse Records