About six months after Another Kind of Consciousness, Mathieu Bertrand’s interesting solo project The Fall of Mother Earth is back with a second full length entitled From Darkness to Light. As I had already remarked on his debut work, the musician from Rennes gives his musical creature a DIY connotation taken to the extreme consequences, since the only possible contact can be made via bandcamp. Once again, however, those in search of good music outside of the circle of the usual knowns would do well to push themselves to the limit in this operation because we are once again in the presence of an album of great merit. Compared to the previous release, the sound leans decisively towards an airy and atmospheric post-black with ripples of a death doom matrix, to which the almost always clean and deep vocal interpretation lends a gothic aura, which emerges particularly in the stupendous The Mirror, where we come close to that superlative band that has been Dreadful Shadows. After all, one only has to listen to the first two tracks, Distant Blue and A New Beginning, to understand the potential of this musician, capable of first offering a poignant melody that rivals the best Neige, and then giving that freshness and melodic impact that the latest Katatonia struggle to achieve. More than fifty minutes of inspired and enveloping sounds, divided into seven songs with different moods, but always united by the presence of intense melodic cues, unfold without leaving any sensation other than that of being in the presence of a musician who has the talent in his hands and in his head to break out of the comfortable niche in which, I don’t know whether by choice or necessity, he is currently confined; if I already thought so on the occasion of Another Kind of Consciousness, today I am even more convinced that a good 70 per cent of the bands in possession of a record contract and moving in this stylistic sphere are not even remotely worth The Fall of Mother Earth. As the poignant melodies of the concluding When the Colors Fade ring in my ears, I think that, despite being in slightly different musical territory, I find some similarities between the talented Mathieu and Sergio Gonzalez Catalan with their Rise to the Sky; even the latter’s first releases remained confined to a small circle of listeners for a long time before the support of a label allowed them to be opportunely divulged, so the hope is that sooner or later the same will happen to the good French musician

2022 – Independent