Artist: Autumnblaze
Album: Perdition Diaries
Type: Album
Label: Prophecy Productions
I knew I’d come across Autumnblaze at some point before, but I just couldn’t put my finger on where it was. After a bit of Columbo-like investigating it turns out I’d heard the bands 2004 album ‘Words Are Not What They Seem,’ which was a very different beast stylistically to this one (and, their earlier work too, according to what I’ve read) being almost alt rock in places. The band split in 2006, that album being the final nail in their coffin until their 2008 reformation and their explosion of emotive creativity that is ‘Perdition Diaries.’
There is a lot of variation throughout the album, taking you on a musically despondent journey via the likes of Daylight Dies and Swallow the Sun in the album’s more doomy, rage-filled times, as well as frequent touches of mid-period Katatonia or Paradise Lost popping out of the shadows in the more solipsistic, poignant moments. There’s even the odd sign of something entirely less doomy when the pedal is pushed firmly to the metal on tracks such as ‘I Had to Burn This Fucking Kingdom’, which sounds more like something you would expect to hear on an early Dark Tranquillity album. ‘Empty House’ and ‘Ways’ are the two tracks that show the gentler moments of Autumnblaze; the former throwing a tiny sprinkling of stripped down My Dying Bride on the listener, and the piano-led latter almost sounding like a relation of Nick Cave in it’s cleanly sung warm, but downbeat overtones.
As an album this flows incredibly well when you take into consideration the amount of variation and tempos that are on show here. Emotion pours from the weeping riffs like tears, before taking a bi-polar like transformation into unbridled rage and bile-spitting bitterness in an uncompromisingly swift and unpredictable manner. ‘Perdition Diaries’ is a brilliantly crafted masterpiece that takes both the fragility and passion of humanity and moulds it into musical form.
www.myspace.com/autumnblazeband
http://www.autumnblaze-kingdom.com/
Lars Christiansen
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