2023-11-03 19:11:20
Darkness remains stylistically changeable, but this time it tries to deliver a jack-of-all-trades that summarizes its previous development with new perspectives: Spine isn’t exactly spineless, but it’s frustratingly random.
It has always seemed to be just as easy as it is fashionable in the scene, Darkness to deny “true” authenticity. But this circumstance also works in the opposite direction, as you are immediately labeled as a purist metal snob as soon as you criticize the Swede’s music.
This circumstance, which is at least subjectively perceived, fits in Spine now with an almost intrusive, paradoxically also sobering cold ambivalence: the Dane’s fourth studio album reaches into a box of ingredients that yields to every inclination as well as calculated obligations, and throws it once morest the wall to see what sticks. The result is, following the completely successful start with Bonfire – a cinematographic film regarding the folkloric foothills of the north hanging in the mystical fog Folk songs gliding intro, which places Amalie Brun’s spherical voice as an instrumental element next to magical strings – an album that contrasts absolutely promising approaches with many wrong decisions, and constantly scrapes along the pastiche, leaving potential to become the unrounded clusterfuck that so many are interested in things disturb.
Above all, the seemingly arbitrary songwriting, which seems to work through a list of aesthetics to be implemented in an aimlessly structured manner over long stretches, often unable to provide the resolving climax through abrupt endings or compositions that are deliberately maneuvered into dead ends. Or a production that has a weak, annoyingly pale and simply boring production that hardly shows any teeth and does not provoke any toxicity in the mix of all that Singing is subordinated – which unfortunately suffers from this, the most uniform and unvariable performance Darkness photographed so far. Which in turn is detrimental to the disposition of the songs, which want to be varied.
In Like Humans The ethereal vocal line over the dark doom rock with its generically heavy riffs and rhythms ensures a bittersweet catchiness, although the shift to black metal blasts washed out by the ethereal wave seems downright cheesy. Also that Mothlikeelectronically shimmering synth pop assimilated by the Spine atmosphere (the Darkness Incidentally, it is just as fabulous as the pathos of the chamber music piano ballad that associates Ioanna Gika with a net and a double bottom My Blood Is Gold) nagging textures and howling guitars are added, making it clear that the hard pace is the record’s redundant weak point – no matter how beautifully the melodramatic title track can be trivialized into the sublime niche of blackgaze and post metal, Song of the Valkyries Tremolo and blast beat without any aggression as a pure (and also abruptly twisted) feel-good zone, because the sound without rough corners and edges also uninterestingly puts the approach of a cool, but hardly inspired formula riffing in the role of Achilles heel.
The situation doesn’t improve at the back either: the good thing Blazing Sky rattles beyond Chelsea Wolfe Gothic with a pop feel, but in the last third it is simply diverted into a lost ambience only to get lost there, while the final padded black metal blast is in the orchestral arranged darkwave dream Devil in the Detail seems unnecessary before the plucked lullaby Human child As a sentimental declaration of love to the offspring, it ensures a self-contained, even almost conciliatory ending, but above all it underlines that with regard to Spine Overall, less would simply have been more.
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