Articoli

Nine years after its release, Riccardo Veronese’s Aphonic Threnody release a new version of their first full length When Death Comes (for the occasion renamed When Death Comes Again); such an operation might seem to be aimed at filling a void from a creative point of view, but this is not the case, in fact, if we think that from 2020 until 2022 the band regularly released one album per year. The mostly funeral-oriented sounds that emerged in the last three albums (in this order, The Great Hatred, The All Consuming Void and the mastodonthic The Loneliest Walk) are diluted here by the new version of the debut album, in which Veronese summons a considerable number of guests, all from the world doom scene, and distributes them in the five tracks of the album, the last of which (Our Way to the Ground) is even proposed in two different versions; thus, within the work one finds oneself in the company of names known to those who frequent the genre such as Riccardo Conforti (Void of Silence), Giovanni Vigliotti (Somnent), Déhà (Slow, Imber Luminis), Ryan Wilson (The Howling Void), Alejandro Sabransky (Funeris), Sergio González Catalán (Rise to the Sky) and John Suffering (Chalice of Suffering), who join those who had participated in the original edition (in addition to Veronese, Roberto Mura, Greg Chandler, Ábel Libisch, Kostas Panagiotou and David Unsaved). The songs, already splendid in the 2014 version, here take on a slightly different look but still aiming at the melodic side of death doom, with the two opening tracks (The Ghost’s Song and Death Obsession) standing out as shining gems while maintaining the same enormous evocative potential. When Death Comes Again is a successful and far from superfluous operation that, for this reason, certainly deserves the attention of fans, precisely because of the skill of Aphonic Threnody in breathing new life into an album that was already quite relevant at the time of its release.

2023 – Independent