Gothic death doom of good workmanship is what we get from Belgrade thanks to The Father Of Serpents. Trying to put at the same time on the plate the influences coming mainly from giants of the genre such as Moonspell, My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost, ours succeed without doubt in the not easy task and where the freshness of the proposal is partly sacrificed, we receive in return a clean interpretation full of good melodic ideas. In fact, the only criticism that can be attributed to the Serbian band is just that of seeming sometimes a congregation of very good assemblers of the intuitions of others, a feeling that takes hold, for example, since the second song The Flesh Altar, with its leading riff similar to that of Lesbian Show by Nightfall, and that continues until the end, with the most experienced fan who will delight in finding passages that evoke, in a way that is never too marked, the best offered by the genre in the last twenty years. Having said that, let’s come to the positive sides, which are then clearly prevailing on any other consideration: The Father Of Serpents, with Age Of Damnation put together a work of considerable quality thickness, with about ten songs characterized by an enviable balance between roughness and melody, expressing a gothic doom often elegant in which the appropriate use of the violin (by Pavle Sovilj, who also takes care of the clean vocals) gives in more than one occasion a decisive melancholic touch. The Slavic sextet gives a test without smears, the sounds are excellent as well as the arrangements, the use of the double voice is unassailable (the excellent growl is the work of Tamerlan, who however has recently left the band) and it’s really hard to find a song that is not up to the situation, with an obligatory mention for the remarkable Tainted Blood and not only for the quote from Dante (“lasciate ogni speranza voi che entrate“, declaimed with a diction really revisable). This overall picture suggests us that Age Of Damnation is a remarkable album, produced by a band with a sure potential that must make, however, only a small effort to give a personal mark to their music, otherwise it will remain in the comfortable limbo of the realities of good level but nothing more.

2017 – Satanath Records