A dark, rain soaked landscape stretches forebodingly into the hazy distance. The grey clouds hang heavy over the mists of dank depression, a smog of broken dreams and lost hope. The perfect landscape for a soundtrack of melancholic Gothic Doom Metal. However, The Foreshadowing hail from Lazio in Italy -a place synonymous with the sun-baked ruins of Rome. But that’s a decent scene of decay right there, you have to take your misery where you can find it, and these black-clad Italian Metallers lurk in the shadows, away from the sun’s glare, bringing their own, new slice of dourness to the world, a lengthy eight years after their previous album.
That previous album “Seven Heads Ten Horns” was actually the band’s fourth album in nine years at the time, and I reviewed it for these very pages. Eight years is a good long while between albums, but The Foreshadowing stand resolute, ready to once more continue presenting their own take on a style with more than a thirty year legacy. But they manage to still retain a good dose of originality within a genre that has had its fair share of high profile purveyors over the years since Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, Anathema and the like first shuffled their way moodily into the dim spotlight.
The Doom Metal side of the band has been further supplemented by a slightly more Gothic Rock attitude between their two most recent offerings, something that was always in evidence, but still delivered here with an unreserved Metal bite. Moonspell still spring to mind at one end of their spectrum and Depeche Mode continue to haunt the other, but also Novembre, Divercia, a hint of early HIM and the slower moments of The Vision Bleak are also evoked. These broad comparisons come from the band blending traditional gothic style vocals with a Paradise Lost, mid-era Amorphis or Moonspell type guitar style that on this album relies on slow but impactful rhythms to drive the hard-hitting guitar work and moody keyboards.
Even when the tempo quickens a little, like on ‘Heraclitus’, it’s delivered in the same smooth, sweeping style that makes it barely noticeable. The continuity the band have crafted on this album must be commended because each track flows perfectly, blending well with its neighbour and drifting purposefully through an album of depth, passion, drama and darkness. Of course it’s melancholic, it’s almost refreshingly so, as the album swaggers along full of self-assured gloom. Nothing really leaps out on first listen, nothing grabs you by the throat, it’s not intended to, but give it time and it gently oozes and slithers its way around you, entrancing you, enticing you. The Foreshadowing have certainly refined their sound and matured over the last 8 years, championing a genre all too sparse in the modern era.
(7.5/10 Andy Barker)
https://www.facebook.com/theforeshadowing
https://theforeshadowinglfr.bandcamp.com/album/new-wave-order
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