Month: April 2018

Collapse Of Light is a new successful example of a coalition of musicians from different backgrounds and nations, aimed at creating an autonomous entity capable of offering much more than the simple sum of the addendums. If the group’s engine is Portuguese, a peculiarly Nordic component is offered by the presence of Natalie Koskinen, a vocalist well known within the doom scene by virtue of her historical militancy in Shape Of Despair and then, recently, for her collaborations with Daniel Neagoe’s Clouds. The result is an atmospheric doom that encompasses the melancholic approach to the existence of two populations very distant from each other in terms of climate and morphology, but close for that widespread melancholic feeling that in the Finns is expressed musically with darker and more vehement traits, while in the Lusitanians it acquires more intimate traits that, if you like, are a direct emanation of the highest expression of their popular music, which is the fado, a word that is equivalent to doom (in this sense, listen to the wonderful The Remains Of The Day). Natalie’s voice is, as always, more persuasive than looking for virtuosity, and it is perfectly complemented by the growl of Carlos D’Agua, who was the vocalist in that beautiful and underrated work entitled …One Day Less by Before The Rain, a band in which the other two official members of the band, Gonçalo Brito and Carlos Monteiro, have also played, though at different times. Each Failing Step is a magnificent album, precisely because it develops in a way that is less obvious than the combination of male and female vocals in doom metal might lead one to expect: as mentioned, the sound is mostly intimate and only rarely takes on robust features; when this happens, however, the sense of melancholy turns into something tangibly painful. A Place To Die opens the album and represents its manifesto, touching along its seventeen minutes all the sonic nuances that Collapse Of Light put into a writing of rare sensitivity, enveloping the listener and transmitting emotions in a more dilated but not less effective way. I Will Not Return is relatively shorter and rougher than the opener and preludes to the crystal clear pause of the aforementioned The Remains Of The Day, before the closing track Leaving The Light Behind, also not far from the quarter hour mark, pushes the sound into territories very close to Clouds, exhibiting an atmospheric, melodic and really touching death doom. Excellent vocals and a great quality guitar work are elements that, alone, would not be enough to raise an album to the threshold of excellence if there were not writing skills such as those exhibited by Collapse Of Light, a project that had a rather long gestation but that, in the end, has led to a result that repays all this waiting for both the musicians involved and the same doom fans.

2018 – Rain Without End Records