Ah the label have kindly invented a genre on the biog here for us and called the musical style ‘Emphatic.’ Putting this in bracketed context they have also tagged the words ‘folk-progressive-black-gothic metal’ and yes in case that has you scratching your head, this is a real hodgepodge of styles. The Italian band (yeah, like you were not aware of that) have one album bearing their name as a title prior to this, which was released in 2005. They also seem to have somewhere in the region of eight past members and six current ones meaning that one hell of a lot of different ideas and personalities have obviously been put into the mixing pot to get where we are today. This kind of comes across in this recording as it does strike as somewhat schizophrenic too.
This album is 57 minutes in length and between each track there is a section of spoken word (with incidental ambient musical accompaniment) lasting around 1-2 minutes. Now this is all well and good and it is obvious that this plays as a subtext and unravels some sort of concept to the album, the one problem is that it is in Italian. Although the music is as well, this particularly distracts the non Italian speaking listener and makes everything kind of redundant. I am left feeling like I am a stranger in a strange land and really missing out on the important crux of the matter. I would out of choice no more pick up a book in Italian and attempt to read it then I would listen to these parts. Therefore I would not really be able to do much to sell this album to you unless you speak the lingo as you too will probably derive little enjoyment from the experience.
That big stumbling block aside we come to the actual music itself which I must also report does little to enthral. Sure it is clever and avant-garde, there are screams and clean vocals, moody passages of sax, acoustic folk interludes and metallic leanings (although this never really gets quite frenzied enough to invoke full on head-banging except perhaps on the albums best track ‘Il Canto Del Mare’). In its favour this is pretty unique, I would be hard pushed to have other band names flowing off the tip of my tongue to draw comparison to; the biog mentions Solefald but this to me is rather an abstract similarity. I do notice that the band used to have a female singer in their ranks but on this album vocal femininity is only touched upon fleetingly, more for occasional backing work and I would preferred them being more prolific, as when they are used they strike as being very effective.
On the whole this has been a frustrating listen and I would have liked to enjoy this album more but had an uphill struggle with it. It shall no doubt be passed onto an Italian friend who may well appreciate it more than I and I wish an Italian speaker had been a member of our reviewing team so they could have got more into the essence of ‘Teatroelementale’
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