This is an Italian two-man symphonic black metal band. The style of music they perform is the pseudo-classical one that later Norwegians such as Tartaros and Limbonic Art have made some successful works out of. This isn’t very successful. It sounds incoherent, un-focused and that it was composed to impress their girlfriends.

The keyboards are the dominant element, even though the guitar fuzz is not as monotonous and drowned out as it has used to be on Limbonic Art’s albums. Vocals screech somewhat impressively on top of the texture quite the same way as Ihsahn’s did on Emperor’s ”In the Nightside Eclipse”, with the main difference that here the vocals sound forced and attention-craving. The drum machine does not sound rhythmically relevant, it plays the same blast beats over and over. The keyboard compositions do not hold enough power to convey the feelings that they try; there are some wild dissonances in the ”orchestra” and the chords sizzle megalomaniacally from down to up and from up to down but all of this happens with the integrity of elevator music.

The material is at it’s best in the completely synth-instrumental parts where there is apparently less meaningless chaos and more attention paid to what is happening in the composition. The instrumental song ”Falling” might be from a work by Limbonic Art or Sirius, but I would not see any reason to behold this demo as a creation on par with those two.

I might be opinionated against this whole semi-genre, but it all sounds like ”intellectual satanism” to me. The lyrics use a lot of words about fire and souls and shadows; the music uses a lot of chords and bombastic sounding keyboard samples. It manages to be music. I bet that academicians would find something ”representative of post-modern neo-romanticism” here. But it fails to be evil.

© 1999 black hate