Italian black metal band Infamous unleashed its third full-length album, Tempesta, on CD-R limited to a hundred copies. This band carved a niche for itself with its incredibly violent music that nonetheless conjured up the naturalistic, feral and sentimental spirit of black metal that confronts reality directly and generates a sense of opposition to decay.
Like the previous Infamous release, Rovine e Disperazione, the third album — as shown by the sample track below — emphasizes better riff definition and the slow emergence of depth of melody through layered composition. With recent work revealing a possible Ildjarn influence, Infamous tread waters of a careful balance between the emotional aspects of melody and the primal alienated violence which was characteristic of older Norse bands, albeit in a style which reflects its Southern European roots. Fans of Greek black metal and the more windblown releases from Graveland and Ancient might appreciate this one.
With any luck, a deserving label will pick up this band and re-issue its discography, a series of recordings which display raw creativity along with a steely-eyed glimpse at the ongoing failure of humanity.
Much like Nordic pioneers Ildjarn, Infamous combines the sounds of Oi and hardcore punk with black metal, but takes an approach similar to that of the Southern European black metal scene: longer melodies and song constructions building up to a triumphant explosion of rage.
Infamous uses longer melodies in the recursive style of RAC bands, which builds off a simple series of intervals a phrase with quite a bit of range, achieving an effect that inverts the drone of rock/blues into a diminishing melodic interval that expands into the stronger whole note and chromatic scales. Adding to this the band dig into a vast lexicon of black metal styles and produce a language all their own, choosing one progression (much like Enslaved) to guide the song and then branching to variations and oppositional phrases to build tension before a reunion, often with a sentimental lead guitar figure over the top. This creates an immersive sound which is both highly emotional and devoid of association with the comfortable sounds of music centered on humans, sounding more like ancient processionals filtered through violent punk bands and translated into black metal. The resulting atmosphere suspends disbelief and creates a fantastic world in which themes come alive as if on a stage.
With Abisso, Infamous improve over their debut Of Suicide and Silence by varying the form of each song more and as a result differentiating melodies through their development. In addition, higher speed drumming and guitar strum gives this EP a greater intensity without falling into sawing chaos. In many ways, it presages the wider changes which were to occur with the next full-length, Rovine e Disperazione, which took the band further into Ildjarn territory. For those who appreciate the pure spirit of black metal as it explores more of one of its foundational influences, this half-hour detour into an unearthly existence will provide savage enjoyment and contemplation.
Black metal like most underground metal compares to Romantic art because it has a passion for nature, the raw power of the universe and the emotions which are true in the human being. This inherently rejects the false madness of the madding crowd but most fans of Romantic literature never get to that phase and translate its meaning into nature fetishism and self-pity. Infamous restore the Romanticism to metal with a dark nature worship album that preserves the savage beauty of this genre.
Deriving its basic approach from what can only be described as the more ambitious early Ancient compositions applied to the thematic material of early Enslaved, albeit translated to a country far from the frozen north, Of Solitude and Silence drops into a lush series of melodies that maintain distinctive shape and expression in both rhythm and tone, allowing Infamous to weave songs of multiple contrasting themes that conclude in a beautiful rising of mood from within. These are outright sentimental, like work from Graveland, Sorcier des Glaces or Immortal on Pure Holocaust, but if you can get over that vulnerable yet accessible and stately violent emotion, much excellent songwriting is found therein. Infamous primarily rely on the renowned black metal high speed tremolo strum overly slowly changing drum patterns, aided by reverb and closet-muffled production in achieving its atmospheric ends, but the strength of each song comes from the ability to put riffs together in a coherent form which nonetheless maintains internal contrast to create the sensation of motion and change outside the individual, which is where the essence of the black metal sound (and Romantic poetry) originates.
Instrumentation takes a path for simple but effective, with guitars avoiding complex technique in favor of complex riffs of basic power chords and arpeggiated chords at a slower polyrhythmic strum. At some point, this drummer has listened to a fair amount of hardcore or Oi, possibly even verging into Ildjarn-worship. But the essence of this release remains the flowing longer instrumentals of early black metal experimentation, a source of great potential it never followed up on, and by indulging these in a layered sense of emotion Infamous creates an entirely transporting musical journey. While this one fell off the radar for most of us, it presents one of the more capable and visionary concepts of black metal after the first wave from Norway.
