Day: April 18, 2023

Time passes inexorably, and one of the peculiar ways of realising this is when, speaking of music, one discovers that a band has not produced an album in a long time, even if the perception of such a time lapse seems less. The Foreshadowing, in fact, have not released a long-distance album since the splendid Seven Heads, Ten Horns (2016); while waiting to fill this gap, the Roman band offers their not inconsiderable admirers this beautiful ep entitled Forsaken Songs, which from the title alone makes it clear that it is a collection of songs that, for various reasons, have not been used within the albums released in the past, with a couple of exceptions that we will see. The first is The Forsaken Son, one of the most beautiful songs ever composed by The Foreshadowing, being part of Second World (2012) and here rendered in a much more rarefied and acoustic version, but just as magnificent. The second is the cover of Such a Shame by Talk Talk, a song that anyone who knows music at 360° cannot have loved, especially those who, like yours truly, are already of a certain age and experienced those sounds when they were still very young. We are talking about a version that is in its own way faithful to the original, which allows both to pay homage to the late Mark Hollis, and to show the band’s ability to turn a song with synth pop textures into something more melancholic, also thanks to Marco Benevento’s unmistakable vocal timbre. The other four tracks are We The Others, taken from the recording sessions of the next album (whose imminent release is not yet foreseen), Memento, left off the tracklist of Second World and also released as a single, Paranoid Boyd, itself released as a sngolo in 2018, and the splendid The Rains of Castamere (a Requiem for Wolves), only released on YouTube in 2014. Even if this partially leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of the band’s fans, because after seven years they would have expected a long-distance work, the very fact that The Foreshadowing have returned to the game by offering at least some previously unreleased material is a good sign, especially since the style and ability to offer a peculiar sound with a high emotional impact seems to have remained unchanged, and this bodes well for the future.

2023 – Independent