Day: June 7, 2018

The Finnish Totalselfhatred, since their appearance on the scene with the full length self-titled just ten years ago, represent that wing of depressive black metal able to combine the despair expressed by the lyrics and the concept, inherent in works related to the subgenre, to a melodic sense that becomes the cornerstone on which are based the most successful albums. Seven years after Apocalypse In Your Heart, when maybe someone had given them up for lost, here they are again among us, these four Finnish musicians, skilled as few others in evoking the most mournful visions, letting the self-annihilation become, thanks to the painful beauty of their music, even an acceptable event. Solitude winds along five medium-long tracks, a time needed for each episode to outline its own melodic and rhyming identity and, for the whole work, to impress itself effectively in the memory of the listeners: on a strictly stylistic level, in fact, the album would not be so naturally cataloged in the dsbm because, beyond the heartbreaking vocals (but not too much compared to other realities), musically we are faced with a work that does not evoke joy but in which the melody plays a key role in most of the tracks, except for the single and rougher Hollow, while in the remaining tracks the balance hangs in favor of the more rarefied and melancholic parts. The almost title track Solitude MMXIII offers poignant guitar melodies, while the existential torment takes on even more intense tones in Cold Numbness and Black Infinity, until the splendid finale with Nyctophilia, which well illustrates what is absurdly the moment of relief for the depressed, the night, the only part of the day in which you can remove the mask and stop pretending to have fun or make social life, which in the end is even heavier than loneliness itself. It is not at all easy to portray suffering and inner discomfort through such clear and relatively accessible musical content: the greatness of Totalselfhatred lies precisely in this gift, which is only possessed by a few.

2018 – Osmose Productions