Day: March 23, 2018

For what it’s worth, Rome In Monochrome make use of one of the most fascinating monikers that a band dedicated to sounds like those offered by the band from Rome could choose. And if it is true that the brand alone is not enough, it is undeniable that it constitutes a sort of imprimatur on the sound that will be discovered during the listening of an album: on the other hand, the founder of the band, Gianluca Lucarini, has accustomed us also with his other bands to outline since the name the style offered: so, if from Degenerhate or Exume To Consume it is difficult to expect something that does not have to do with the most extreme metal, between brutal death and grindcore, from Rome In Monochrome is more than fair to imagine a proposal soft, melancholic, but at the same time made restless by shadows that sometimes hover threatening in the grayness of a widespread blurred snapshot. Away From Light is the finalization of a work started three years ago with the ep Karma Anubis, thanks to which they laid the foundations of a sound that looks inevitably to Katatonia as well as to the more intimate Antimatter (those of Leaving Eden, in particular) for the characteristics just described, but wrapping everything of that particular way to face the dark matter in the Roman scene, starting from the founders Novembre and their even latent extreme legacies to go up to the most ethereal Klimt 1918. In the poetics of Rome In Monochrome, the reaction to pain occurs in a dignified and composed manner, as if to represent the acceptance of an ineluctable destiny which, therefore, is not rendered by exhibiting desperate traits but through a sense of widespread sadness, precisely that from which derives the monochromatic greyness to which we are condemned if we try to observe reality with a disenchanted gaze, when dreams are swept away by everyday life. The eight brushstrokes of sound creep in and take shape after listening, leaving a mark much more pronounced than the only apparently mitigated incisiveness of a sound that, only rarely, is shaken by passages in growl (the work of the same Lucarini except in Paranoia Pitch Black, where he deals with no less than Carmelo Orlando) and by equally sporadic rhythmic acceleration. Everything takes place in a milky environment, well described by the intimate sadness evoked by the vocal timbre of Valerio Granieri, to which you end up dangerously accustomed almost as if you were comfortably immersed in a sort of amniotic liquid, and offers its highest and most exciting moments in the first three tracks, Ghost Of Us, A Solitary King (my favourite, with a beautiful guitar turn to constantly support the voice) and the already mentioned Paranoia Pitch Black; if we want, the only defect of the album is that it expresses the best in its first third, keeping then always on a very good level but without reaching the same emotional peaks. The song that can be fully ascribed to doom, Only The Cold, closes at its best a work whose sound spectrum is also crossed by post rock and shoegaze, under the sign of a poisonous malaise that remains constantly confined to the background of an image wrapped in a blanket of fog. Away From Light is obviously addressed to sensitive souls prone to melancholy, who will also enjoy the sonic perfection guaranteed by Fabio Fraschini’s production and Dan Swanö’s mastering.