This is the second album by the Greek Sextet hailing from Athens. Their style of melodic doom-death if very well delivered and transitions seamlessly from full on mellow melodies to extremely heavy death metal blasts and lengthy songs that merge both perfectly.
The album opens with Aris Nikoleris’s orchestral keyboards and piano on first song “Poetry For The Dead”, while Filippos Koliopanos and Dimitra Zarkadoula’s guitars fill the song with hauntingly melodic guitars with a tinge of distortion that get substantially heavier once Charalabos Oikonomopoulos’s slow and deep growls make their presence felt.
There are times when “Dale Of Haunted Shades” sounds like they are just running through scale progressions, but very intricately written ones with interesting bridges to make them a single piece of work.
Slowly getting heavier as it goes along, “Unspoken Actions” uses the melodic guitars as something of beauty behind the rather more abrasive vocals, the majority of the song is instrumental and exceptionally easy to get lost in.
Slower still, with a winding guitar lead, “Imprisoned Between Worlds” has the vocals add the heaviness to the song as the rest of the instruments remain pleasantly subdued, but when the guitars increase in intensity with the lead playing unhindered you keep waiting for the crescendo to end while additional layers are added, so when it does, it is all the more heart-wrenching.
“Cryptic Constellations” keeps mellowing out momentarily before the kick drums step up their pace and the growls follow suit, with the guitars maintaining pace but increasing their intensity, or dropping it completely to allow Giannis Koskinas’s bass to pop over Aris’s tinkering keyboards.
The bass features prominently once more in the intro to “Pale Wisdom”, where I’d happily listen to it and the piano for twice as long, but once the guitars and drums enter the fray, the keyboard melody forces its way back to the fore until the vocals take over as a focal point before the song finds its groove and plays itself out.
The album ends with “Undeserving”, where the slow melodic guitars over the even slower drums go acoustic once the vocals join, before getting heavier once more as the vocals fade out again, but it all comes together again in a melodic cacophony where the melancholic lead is played with plenty of emotion, and it can be heard.
A really good example of bringing melody and raw emotion together to showcase the band’s song writing ability.
(8/10 Marco Gaminara)
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