Here it comes, at the end of a 2016 forgettable for many reasons (in the musical field mainly for the death of rock/metal icons and certainly not for the quality of the releases), a work able to excite and make people think, simply turning into notes, without resorting to tricks or special effects, the feeling of its author, Silvio Spina from Cossoine (Sassari). His project My Silent Land can be defined homemade in the truest sense of the term, and this is likely to be misleading, making you think immediately of something poorly edited: listening to Life Is War, the first CD release of the one man band after a demo dating back a few years ago, puts us in front of the work of a musician with clear ideas both from the compositional point of view and lyrically. The album, in fact, is focused on a thorny and perhaps abused as the war, but seen (fortunately) for what it is, or a tragedy for those who are involved in the first person and, often, even indirectly, without slipping in the forms of dangerous fascination that the topic exerts in different environments of metal; musically Silvio moves on ambient folk post-rock territories, occasionally recalling some well-known names, such as Antimatter in the initial phase of The Battle or the last Anathema in Dark & Light, but these are just flashes, unconditional reflections not so much of the author but more of the listener, especially if he has stored many years of music in his memory. The truth is that Life Is War appears peculiar because it is fresh, the result of the compositional instinct of someone who is rather outside the canonical musical circuits (even if it should be noted the participation as bassist, in The Departure, of the fellow countryman Bloody Hansen, creator of the intriguing project The Providence) and that, therefore, composes music for the pleasure of doing it without any particular calculation and without getting lost in the attention to details sacrificing the substance. There’s not a single minute wasted in this beautiful work, which makes us immerse in atmospheres more melancholic than tragic, although this may seem strange for a concept focused on the war, here intended both from the point of view of war itself, both in a metaphorical sense wanting to create a parallelism with the daily life of each of us. It ‘s nice to get lost in this forty minutes led mostly by acoustic guitar and voice, sometimes uncertain and in this sense in line with the current trends of neo folk, but always able to effectively convey the thought of the author, under the banner of a compositional linearity that goes in a stubborn and contrary direction, by result and intent, compared to the exhibition of musical contortions brainiacs designed to hide, more often than not, huge gaps in inspiration. Simplicity that, I want to reiterate, should not be mistaken for banality: My Silent Land turns out to be a project, however, cured, in which there are references to the cinema or modern history, through the use of samples such as those taken from Saving Private Ryan (The Battle) or Kennedy’s speech on the New World Order (Dark & Light). New World Order is, in fact, the song that closes the work, a bonus track that is the demo version of a track that will flow on the next work by My Silent Land: a taste that, given the extremely positive outcome of Life Is War, raises expectations for future moves of the excellent Sardinian musician.

2017 – Independent