1476
Our Season Draws Near

January, 1643.
My name is William Ineson, and I will keep this diary as a record for the coming months. I will take my family away from this colony; here the Word of the Lord no longer seems to be the same that our parents taught us, and their parents before them. We will all leave, my wife and my four children, and when Samuel is born, he will breathe new air, finally God-fearing, and he will grow up with healthy principles that I fear are beginning to lack in our other offspring. I have already identified a clearing a hundred kilometers north of here, bordered by a forest and near a river, a perfect place to start anew and seek the Kingdom of God.

March, 1643.
The house has been built in a few days, thanks also to the valuable help of Caleb: the boy will become a strong man if he continues on this path and follows the teachings of the Lord. Every day we go hunting, and he helps me cultivate the field; we have already sown the wheat that we hope to harvest next June. Thomasin also tries to be helpful: she is blossoming, becoming a woman, a beautiful woman, and I wonder how she has grown so beautiful: if we were not so God-fearing and protected by His benevolence, I would almost say she enchants you so much is her sensuality. The twins are strange: they play constantly and sing disturbing chants, they seem to have a strange relationship with Black Phillip, our goat, but it's fine as long as they take care of him and take him out. The day they stop doing even that, I swear I will lock them in the stable with him. Katherine tries to do her best, but I don't think she has gotten used to this new reality: she gave birth to Samuel alone and in pain, the good Lord helped her. Yet she seems to have a morbid relationship with the newborn, and at the same time, she almost seems to envy the flourishing beauty of Thomasin.
I have a strange feeling; I pray God to give me the strength to continue on the right path.

June, 1643.
Samuel is dead. My Lord, give me strength. We had left him with Thomasin, and that fool let him slip away, no one knows how. She says a spell took him, made him disappear right from under her eyes; it was the witch, she says, the witch of the forest, she took him for her potions. The girl has gone mad, lost her faith; or perhaps not, perhaps Samuel was indeed taken by something. My wife is a river of tears, the twins hysterically sing their rhymes about that damned goat, I only have Caleb to support me now. Even the planting went wrong: the wheat seems sick, blighted; if we were in better conditions, we might not eat it, but as we are, we must feed on it anyway.

July, 1643.
I'm going insane. The sheep have stopped giving us milk; only blood comes from their udders. In this forest, which looms over us like divine judgment, an ancient evil lives. We found Caleb naked in the woods, feverish, delirious, talking about a naked and beautiful woman who kissed him and made him drink a "bloody" wine, so said the ravings of my son. We tied him to the bed, his convulsions are getting stronger, and at night he wakes up reciting passages from the Scriptures that I didn't even think he knew. And Thomasin, that girl scares me: she doesn't seem disturbed by what's happening, she doesn't feel the punishment of God looming over us, and even the twins have started saying she's a witch, that she gave herself to Phillip in exchange for witchcraft powers, and that soon she'll kill us all. I can't believe their stories, but Katherine seems to be listening to them... My wife is losing touch with reality, she talks to herself, I fear for her life.
I can't believe Thomasin is a witch, she's so beautiful...

August, 1643.
This is my last note; tonight I will end it all. Caleb is dead, suffocated by his own seizures; the twins have disappeared, only a trail of blood towards the woods made me understand that it is undoubtedly the witch's doing. I must save Katherine and kill the witch. I've locked Thomasin in the stable with her lover, the goat: now I'll go there and slaughter them both, and burn the heart of what was once my daughter, who is now only the wench and concubine of Satan himself. I will save Katherine and return to the colony. Lord, give me strength, this madness will not consume us entirely.

The beginning of spring brings with it the new work of 1476, a combo from New England which has already been discussed on these same pages.
"Our Season Draws Near" is still closely linked to winter, as is evident from the album cover. Listening to the ten tracks that make up this work, one perceives a more solemn and epic tone that Our Artists wanted to give to their work, with many references to "Wildwood," especially in its final stages. The mentioned album closed with a winter image, of wind and stormy seas, of autumn giving way to the cold season. At the same time, it transported the listener to a dimension so dear to 1476, that of magic, esotericism, superstition, pyres, and summary killings that plagued their region during the witch hunt in the late 1600s. "Our Season..." starts from here, as we said, with a newly heterogeneous musical formula that continues to unite furious moments at the limit of (post) punk and dark metal with slowdowns and introspective phases typical of the darkest and almost tribal folk. Excellent Robb's performance, not only from an instrumental point of view (on the guitar) but also and above all vocally, always able to give a distinctly emotional cut to each piece; as is the great work behind the skins by Neil, with much variety in drumming constituting the heartbeat of each song.
Perhaps it is a less immediate album than the previous ones, probably because it is more complex and even more multifaceted from the point of view of the emotions it knows how to evoke, but believe me, your satisfaction will be great when and if you finally manage to make these ten tracks yours, understand them and get carried away by the images they know how to evoke.
It must be reiterated: the 1476 are a surprise, indeed now a confirmation, to be followed with great attention and trust.