MELENCOLIA ESTATICA
'Hel'
(Temple Of Torturous)
Ambient
black metal hailing out of Italy and is the vision of Climaxia (now
there is a name, heh), whose vision is Melencolia Estatica, she
handles the overall concept, guitar, bass, and “vocal
orchestrations”. I guess that last bit means she plans out and
coaches the vocalists every move and emanation? Speaking of which the
vocals, they are really often more of the dark death metal variety,
set to sometimes ambient and other times noisy harsh aggression.
Something about the music does not flow for me, maybe that is the way
it was intended to be, but often the guitar patterns and tones are
just grating rather than atmospheric, the different instrument sounds
seem to clash again at times and step upon one another’s toes. For
me, rather than finding that harsh and extreme, it just came off
grating and annoying, sort of headache inducing. I do not so much
mind headache inducing music, as long as the music pays off and is
awesome in it’s extremity, that is not the case here. This more
often then not comes off like a cluttered mess and displays a muddled
musical direction or possibly lack of direction I suppose. The more
atmospheric moments (and some of the vocal work), where they slow
down the din of silver wear cascading down a set of stairs, is
actually decently done and enjoyable, yet it is a little hard to
enjoy at the same time, because you know the mess is going to start
up again soon. Yes, maybe I just do not see or understand what they
are going for, but to me this is trying to do a bunch of things at
once, not doing them that well, suffocating the musical whole and not
letting the individual parts much room to breathe, rendering them
nearly useless. I would pass on this, but give their MySpace a listen
and see if you agree with me before writing them off.
(Dale Roy)
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