Day: August 24, 2017

Iapetus is the band of Matthew Cerami (vocals, guitar and bass) and Jordan Navarro (guitar, keyboards and programming), two guys from Long Island who, judging by their words of presentation, seem to be good people as well as good musicians. The Long Road Home is their first full length, which comes after a demo and an ep whose contents are almost entirely merged in this work, of course after being revised and corrected, if only for the fact that, at the time, the vocals were the prerogative of musicians who are no longer part of the group: a rather long gestation, then, but that has definitely provided valuable fruits. The metal in this work takes on progressive features in the purest sense of the term, in the sense that the tracks are not only different from each other but are also multifaceted within them, thanks to a sound in constant evolution that can be both acoustic and intimate, both furious and pushed at times on high speed regimes. The great thing is that all this is performed with amazing property and maturity, making it moreover smooth listening to an album that exceeds not just the hour of duration and anything but immediate fruition. The magnificent instrumental …Of Hangmen & Vertebrae can even appear misleading, as it shows a face of Iapetus that will be revealed later only intermittently, finding space among the many sources of inspiration that Matthew and Jordan are able to convey in a personal style. After all, just look at the photo that portrays the two while wearing, respectively, the shirts of Agalloch and Ne Obliviscaris (whose vocalist Xenoyr is the author of the artwork of The Long Road Home) to understand what are, among others, the main guiding bands for ours, so that, together with the progressive and extreme drives typical of the Australian group, there are also liquid acoustic passages and dramatic tension that has made the band of John Haughm inimitable in its genre. It is not easy to trace such a large amount of music to a specific key point, but it is certain that one of the three final suites, the one entitled My Father, My God, is probably the qualitative and thematic fulcrum of the album (the title should not deceive, because the lyrics are steeped in a scathing, but far from superficial or simply destructive, criticism of religion), dealing with the dramatic moment of the passing with an alternation of furious accesses and delicate acoustic arpeggios to flow into a magnificent final. Wonderful also Savior Solitude, with its closing epic traits, but the work must be enjoyed as a whole, being able to consider it, in deference to the cover, a sort of long journey to the stars that is worth doing from the first to the last step, sincerely hoping that all this does not remain something limited to a few intimates.

2017 – Independent