Day: October 9, 2018

An Autumn For Crippled Children are a strange musical creature that for several years now has been offering a mix of shoegaze, darkwave and black metal, all with very positive results. The only problem of those who engage in similar operations is to deal with listeners who are perhaps not too willing to deviate from their musical tastes, thus risking to displease, on the one hand, those who can not stand the voice in scream and, on the other hand, those who consider the musical development too soft to have the right of citizenship in the panorama of the most extreme genres. Those who do not compartmentalise music will certainly like the work of these Dutchmen, because the trio’s innate ease in weaving melodies that are as enveloping as they are melancholic is always surprising. There isn’t a single track that doesn’t have an incisive harmonic development to which the metal substrate only gives a more robust skeleton without distorting its essence; on the other hand, if it’s true that between magnificent tracks like The Light of September, Lovelorn and Fragility the differences are evident in their approach and rhythms, we can’t help noticing that, in the long run, there’s also the risk of a touch of repetitiveness that can slightly cloud the pleasure of listening. That said, I personally prefer to spend about forty minutes of my time with An Autumn For Crippled Children rather than with the more celebrated Ghost Bath, just to stay on contiguous territories, just because the one of the Dutch band appears to me as a genuine melancholic feeling, unlike the depressive facade, however well built, of the Americans. At their seventh full length in little more than eight years, An Autumn For Crippled Children offer another proof of certain value: The Light of September is an album recommended to the users of the most atmospheric black and lovers of certain post-punk (the bass work is a trademark, in this sense), and you can listen to it with great pleasure thanks to a great fluidity and its peculiarities that, whether purists like it or not, constitute its main strength.

2018 – Consouling Sounds