Day: February 27, 2018

One of the risks of approaching such a work superficially is to reduce it to a normal gothic death doom album with female vocals, along the lines of Draconian and similar bands. Committing such a mistake would not only mean not doing justice to a wonderful album like Into The Eternity A Moment We Are but also depriving oneself, through laziness or laziness, of one of the rare examples of musical art capable of touching the right emotional chords throughout the whole flow of the tracks. Aeonian Sorrow is the musical creature of Gogo Melone, a Greek musician that listeners more familiar with the genre will already have had the opportunity to know by virtue of his participation in Destin, the last ep of Daniel Neagoe’s Clouds, offering specifically his magnificent vocal contribution in the song In This Empty Room. Gogo has personally taken care of the compositional, lyrical and graphic aspects, being one of the most renowned exponents in this field: in short, we are talking about an all-round artist whose talent is finally revealed in all its disruptive potential with Into The Eternity A Moment We Are. Some of the most experienced members of the scene contribute in a fundamental way to the success of the work, accompanying the Hellenic musician and actively collaborating in the arrangement of the tracks, starting from the Colombian vocalist Alejandro Lotero (in Jari Lindholm’s Exgenesis) to the Finnish trio composed by Saku Moilanen (drums, Red Moon Architect), Taneli Jämsä (guitars, Ghost Voyage) and Pyry Hanski (bass, former Before The Dawn and live with Red Moon Architect): Lotero in particular, with his deep growl, is the ideal counterbalance to the evolutions of the singer who, mind you, is not the classic siren with a beautiful voice that starts with a key and ends with it; Gogo Melone is simply a formidable vocalist, capable of passing from crystalline and persuasive timbres to flashes that inevitably bring us back to two giants linked to her own land such as Diamanda Galas, a natural reference as a female voice, and the never enough regretted Demetrio Stratos, who we know well for having developed his career in Italy, first with the seminal Area and then as a true experimenter and scholar of the use of the human voice. Those who think that certain comparisons may be excessive just have to listen to the opener Forever Misery, which in itself would be a wonderful song but which, in its second half, is literally marked by Gogo’s vocals resting on a dramatic sound carpet; as a test of nine then you can also move on to the final Ave End, one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever had the good fortune to listen to, with Alejandro dominating the first part before giving way to the dramatic and transfigured singing of the vocalist, finally destined to rejoin the growl for an overall result that inevitably leads to tears. All this is just an example, because obviously the main body of the album remains to be enjoyed, swinging from harsher atmospheres (Thanatos Kyrie) to other more intimate ones (Memory Of Love), ending with tracks structured in a more canonical way (Shadows Mourn, Under The Light, Insendia) but always with an above-average intensity thanks to a writing of rare sensitivity. It is a delicate piano interlude (The Wind Of Silence) that leads to the absolute masterpiece Ave End, which closes the album bringing the emotional involvement to a level that leaves a tangible sense of emptiness when the music stops, almost abruptly: It’s just a few seconds, but enough to realise that, yes, life is a moment compared to eternity, as the title of the album suggests, but it is up to us to give it meaning by developing to the maximum an empathic potential that allows us to identify with the joy and pain of others, clearly and unequivocally marking the difference between a minority of sentient people and all the others. Having to give a musical reference to the reader, it seems obvious, as already said in the introductory phase, that the Draconian of the first albums are a rather reliable term of comparison, although Aeonian Sorrow have an approach more funereal, atmospheric and with a lesser predominance of the guitar, especially as a soloist, but to make a difference with most of the releases of the genre in recent years is an innate ability to reach the climax of the songs often starting from passages more quiet and intimate. With a work of this thickness, Aeonian Sorrow place themselves on the same level as the bands mentioned in the article, which means the achievement of absolute excellence, obtained also and above all through the epiphany of a precious artistic talent like that of Gogo Melone.

2018 – The Vinyl Division