Italian’s Krysantemia were formed in 2009 by the Secchi brothers, Alessandro & Lucio, with their line up completed by guitarist Alex Ruggeri and vocalist Davide Puccini. Soon after getting together, they self released their debut album “This is Resurrection” which managed to score them local gigs as support for the likes of Grave, Obituary and Kataklysm throughout their next few years of existence. This is their second album, and their first to get proper European distribution by the Italian label New Idols.
First impressions: I’m greeted with a particularly bland pale cream cover to the album with only the text of the band name and album title, as well as what look like smudgy finger marks. Well, let’s just say it doesn’t exactly inspire me with confidence. I strain my eyes, tilt my head to the side… perhaps I’m missing something? Is this some strange sort of magic eye stereogram-styled image which will suddenly jump out at me? Hmm – nope! Not even the band logo looks particularly great, it’s about as generic as it gets. But, not to be perturbed – I’ll let the music do the talking, rather than judging a book by its cover. When I eventually get the unnecessary minute long intro track of crackling static and feedback out of the way, ‘Dark Wedding (Infernal Lovers Reborn)‘ kicks the album off with some mid-paced, grooving riffage, barking howled vocals (equal parts Tardy & later Schuldiner) and melody filled bouncing. ‘Your Pain’ opens with a riff which sounds like it’s been ‘borrowed’ from Sepultura’s ‘Chaos A.D.’, before falling straight into the grooving rhythms once more, topping off with a solo that sounds like it’s fallen right out of the Kirk Hammett ‘how to play guitar’ handbook. ‘Enjoy the Suffering’ starts off more promisingly, with a thrashy sounding riff… before dropping back into a mid-paced sub-core crunching with slow, almost tribal drumming.
Come the mid-point of the album, and everything is starting so blur into one big snooze fest, but I struggle on and continue. If they had the monster riffs, drive and passion, perhaps 15 years ago I would’ve taken an interest in this album, but as of 2013 – it really does nothing for me at all and all feels painfully too late – even when it has a slightly more extreme edge to it due to the vocals and some of the riffs. But, this extremity never really veers into anything more threatening as an album like Obituary’s ‘Back from the Dead’ – an album when Tardy & co were at a creative nadir with a long period of inactivity looming on the horizon.
As a whole, I’d struggle to label this thrash or even death metal which the bands promo sheet proudly labels them as. Sure, there are a few riffs that sound pretty good, some that even sound truly thrashy or deathly, but for the most part this album is made up of slow to mid paced grooving rhythms with a few more plodding metal riffs chucked in on top, before mixing in more chugging predictable half-thrash. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard a shit ton of worse bands for sure, this is far from crappy nu-metal or any other bile inducing rancidity. Not wanting to be on a full downer I do think that they handle their instruments proficiently for the style of metal they play, but for me – I’ll pass thank you very much. The album is about as inspirational as the cover art you can see above. Thus, life lesson learned – perhaps I should start judging things by their covers after all?
(4/10 Lars Christiansen)
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Krysantemia/123645962816
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