Day: January 18, 2018

After the beautiful long-distance debut This Dead Is World, dating back to 2016, which resumed in part the material published in the demo released at the beginning of this decade, Suffer In Paradise come back after about a year and a half with a new work that largely confirms what was already more than a feeling, namely that of being in the presence of a band capable of providing a superlative interpretation of melodic funeral doom. As it was foreseeable, also for the belonging to a musical genre in which it’s not very prone to excessive variations on the theme (and for those who love it this is a merit and not a defect), the Russian trio stabilizes on the coordinates of the previous work, taking as references masters of the genre such as Ea, Skepticism and Profetus and to stay in the former Soviet area, even the never enough regretted Comatose Vigil. Ephemere turns out to be an album of rare beauty and depth, with the guys from Voroneh who prove to be able to give to each of the six long tracks (plus outro) that painful melodic afflatus that elevates the funeral to a supreme musical art form: if the title track, placed at the opening, represents the ideal musical manifesto of Suffer In Paradise, it is entrusted to the following My Pillory the task of throwing the listener in those abysses of despair preparatory to a cathartic ascent. The Swan Song Of Hope begins by bringing with it the mark of the best Worship, with the added value of keyboard arrangements that are the fundamental common feature of the entire work and that, specifically, makes this song something of a beauty at times unbearable; with The Wheels Of Fate the sound hardens in the final part while The Bone Garden and Call Me To The Dark Side lead back to a plan of grim acceptance of a pain that, although latent, is a faithful companion of the existence of each. I can only add that, for statistical purposes, it is a pity that in its long journey through Europe the CD sent by Endless Winter arrived only shortly before the end of the year, because Ephemere would have deserved to be included in the list of the best releases of 2017, with mention as a leading work of the funeral sector, but in the end who cares: what matters is having received the confirmation that Suffer In Paradise have all the chrisms to pick up the legacy of Comatose Vigil and Abstract Spirit (always hoping that both bands come back to life, sooner or later), perpetuating the tradition of recent consolidation of Russian funeral doom.

2017 – Endless Winter