Day: January 25, 2019

Six years after their last full length, We Have Been Dead Since Long Ago, one of the most influential bands of the Moscow doom scene, Evander Sinque’s Who Dies In Siberian Slush, is back. That work, although of good workmanship, had not reached the remarkable level of the debut Bitterness Of The Years That Are Lost, of which the main guidelines had been maintained, in the form of a funeral death doom sometimes dissonant and not very prone to melody. Intimate Death Experience, in this sense, confirms the change of direction already shown in the two songs in the split The Symmetry Of Grief (paired with the Finnish My Shameful), making it clear from the beginning that the sound will not be free of melancholic passages, mostly guitar but also outlined by the keyboard. In addition, to provide that peculiarity that is always welcome as long as it does not turn into a disorienting element, we find the interesting contribution of the flute and especially the trombone, an instrument that more than others, used in such a context, gives the feeling of being in the presence of the band that accompanies the deceased on his last journey. It has to be said that the two tracks from the mentioned split album, And It Will Pass and The Tomb Of Kustodiev, we find again, although rearranged, which is not a bad thing because they are very good tracks, but we can’t help but notice at the same time that the unreleased music on Intimate Death Experience amounts to just under twenty minutes. Not so bad, however, when the two newly minted tracks, apart from the intro Through The Heavens and the short recited Solace, turn out to be some of the best things offered by Who Dies In Siberian Slush in their history: in fact Remembrance and, above all, On Different Sides finally give vent to a melodic nature that, however, does not end up overwhelming the always a bit naive and original style of the Muscovites. In particular, the track that closes the work is really wonderful, in its tragic and painful final crescendo that shows what in my opinion is the best side of the band of Evander Sinque, as always author of a vocal interpretation of great intensity. The return, almost at the same time, of two of the heaviest names of the Russian doom scene as Who Dies In Siberian Slush and Comatose Vigil (albeit with the suffix A.K. due to disputes between the original members) brings to light a movement that in recent years had been overshadowed by other stimulating realities coming from the ex-Soviet countries; it was not easy for Evander to start again, especially after the untimely and painful death of Gungrind, but the results coming out of Intimate Death Experience are extremely convincing.

2018 – Frozen Light