Daniel Neagoe’s is a name dear to all fans of the most atmospheric and melodic funeral death doom, a genre that has helped push to heights of quality difficult to surpass with Eye Of Solitude first, and with Clouds more recently. The Romanian musician is, however, an artist in the most authentic sense of the term and his inspiration seems to draw from a bottomless well, even when the genre is not the one that gave him the greatest visibility. On the other hand, our artist is not new to forays into black metal, first with Sidious along with other of his companions in Eye Of Solitude, then in Vaer with his historical sodal Déhà and, finally, in a previous solo project called Colosus, which, however, has probably been supplanted by this new one called Bereft Of Light. In Hoinar, Daniel openly takes his cues from the Cascadian current that has been one of the most effective recent developments and markers in the black field, making it peculiar and recognizable sound in much of the North American scene: obviously the whole thing is performed by one who wrote an album of rare drama as Canto III and the mood of the work can not help but be affected, bringing along well delineated its stylistic brand and giving it more than one depressive nuance, starting from the choice of a desperate scream that only in the wonderful Freamăt finds its counterpart in the clean vocals. The work basically consists of three main tracks (Legamânt, Freamăt and Tarziu), as well as two instrumental tracks of atmospheric ambient (Uitare and Pustiu), also exhibiting a proper sense of measure and avoiding to saturate the listener with an excessive duration. After all, that branded Bereft Of Light is music of great emotional impact, which can not leave indifferent to its tragic aura diluted by the frequent acoustic rarefactions, performed in a clear and linear way and preparatory to the typical crescendos that are an integral part of Neagoe’s style, made even more evocative by the compact and unison use of all the instrumentation together with the voice. Said of Freamăt, more melodic and relatively accessible thanks to the parts of clean singing, Legamânt and Tarziu are songs imbued with a drama at times paroxysmal, in which the pain overflows from a songwriting always at the highest level. After all, doom and depressive black are just two slightly different ways to express their artistic sensibility by a musician like Daniel Neagoe who, indeed, today can be considered one of the most influential and active in a musical field that may be a niche (certainly is in Italy, unfortunately) but that remains equally one of the instruments of choice to tell the fears, suffering and misery of human existence.

2017 – Loud Rage Music