A welcome return for Polynove Pole, a band that keeps faith with a well-established Ukrainian tradition in gothic death doom. The band from Lviv started its career in the last decade but, after releasing two ep’s and a full length between 2008 and 2009, it remained silent for a long time before coming back with this new ep, On The Edge Of The Abyss, about which in theory there wouldn’t be much to say, for better or for worse, being the repetition of a model that has been consolidated for almost two decades. Actually, the only relatively negative fact is the one related to an unavoidable predictability of the sound, which does not move one iota from the stylistic elements of the genre, including the use of double voice (male growl and female operatic); on the other hand, however, everything is performed with such competence and credibility to make the album a listening not at all superfluous, not only for the most attentive fans of the productions coming from Eastern Europe. Polynove Pole, in fact, unleash five very beautiful songs in which the talented Marianna Laba is the master, with her impeccable operatic soprano setting, a decisive element that goes to fit within a context in which the four songs (the fifth is a short instrumental interlude) are cleverly built around the dichotomy between the two voices, noting the valuable double work of Yurii Krupiak grappling with the guitar and growl. Valga as an example and push to deepen the knowledge of the band, for the hypothetical listener, the final title track, dreamy, sometimes epic and able to touch the right emotional chords without expiring in the cloyingness of certain similar proposals. Polynove Pole exhibit in the best way the coordinates of a genre in which the space for particular variations on the theme is rather reduced, so it doesn’t remain, for those who propose it, that to focus on the writing and on the concreteness of the song form, aspects about which the Ukrainian band shows widely to know its business.

2017 – Independent