Day: July 13, 2022

Someone argues, with good reason, that certain sportsmen with innate talent could excel in any discipline they chose. This paradigm is also applicable to the arts and thus to music, so it is not surprising that some are able to disengage with overlapping results by tackling different genres always with excellent results. To this category belongs Sergio Gonzalez Catalan, who recently exploded with a handful of splendid full lengths of melodic death doom under the moniker Rise to the Sky. This time, the Chilean musician tries his hand at atmospheric black metal, giving life to a new solo project called Winds of Tragedy, and the first full length entitled As Life Drifts Away does not disappoint expectations. Sergio’s ability to create poignant and lacerating melodies obviously remains intact, so the stigmata of the sound that we have come to know with Rise to the Sky are still there; what changes is the rhythmic impact that is subjugated to black metal, even if the slowdowns typical of the main project sometimes surface, as happens in a splendid track like Everything is Dying. The same use of growl instead of the canonical scream further diminishes the gap between the two sides of a coin that continues to be of absolute value, even if for now Winds of Tragedy do not reach the evocative potential of Rise to the Sky in terms of melodic afflatus, unquestionable strong point of Gonzalez Catalan’s songwriting, that here is inevitably compressed by the rhythmic demands of black metal (to draw a parallelism, the same thing happened a few years ago to Daniel Neagoe with his project Bereft of Light). That said, those looking for atmospheric black metal full of memorable cues should make this remarkable As Life Drifts Away their own without hesitation.

2022 – Belfry Records