Alda
Passage

It entered through the window and settled on the edge of the bed: it was night, and no one saw or heard it enter, but in fact, there weren't many people around anyway. It tilted its head towards the door and only heard the snoring of the person sleeping in the nearby room, the crickets in the garden, and the slow, labored breathing that often gave way to a gloomy apnea of the woman, lying motionless on the bed.

For centuries, it had carried out this task, and tonight, on paper, it shouldn't have been any different, yet there was something strange; it felt compassion for that small person, worn out by a terrible malady eating her from the inside; it could still sense the warmth of the tears of the family members around her bed, who had taken turns over the days to say goodbye, and decided to wait a little longer before taking her with it. From the bedside, it flew onto a beam above the bed, in a dark corner, where it curled up and waited for the coming of the day.

The sun didn't take long to arrive, and with it, the first family members, who started their usual endless, weary, and sad coming and going: it watched them, one after another, saw into their hearts, perceived their stories, felt their intentions, and immediately understood whether they were sincere or not. There was the husband, desolate and overcome by sadness, the sick woman's brothers and sisters, who tried to best mask, according to their character, the sadness that was tearing them apart; there were her nephews accompanied by their respective

partners (husbands and wives), and everyone, even those who weren't close relatives but were nonetheless part of that imaginary embrace of people, everyone suffered in their own way, all of them seeing her panting and gasping for air reflected on the moments they had shared.

The owl waited a little while, then felt that time was slipping from the woman's fingers, fingers growing colder due to an increasingly pressing death: her face became more hollow every minute, the apnea more prolonged, her heartbeat fainter. Just as the sun was at its highest, perhaps the worst moment for it considering that at that hour it normally stayed well hidden in the thick of the forest, it seized one of the rare moments when the woman had been left alone to descend from its beam and fly close to her face, close enough to touch her with its feathers. In that moment, the bedridden woman's breath deepened, and then nothing enveloped her: but the soul, no, that was firmly imprinted in the eyes of the feathered ferryman, who flew swiftly out of the window and disappeared into the nearby woods.

The first to re-enter was the husband, who, noticing his wife's passing, called all the relatives, who slowly entered the room to give their last farewell to the now cold remains. They didn't know it, but through the dark eyes of the bird that had saved her soul, the woman was watching and thanking them one by one, even just for sharing with her the last moments of a life that could have been longer, but one that had given her enough joys to leave with peace in her heart.

More than four years have passed since the last work of the Americans Alda, that "Tahoma" which, for those following the events of the (no longer new) wave of U.S.-branded black, constitutes one of the cornerstones of Cascadian Black Metal. Supported by a label well-rooted in American soil and fitting both ethically and ideologically, the band returns to the market with "Passage," an album that takes cues from some moments of its predecessor to evolve towards more reflective and considered forms. "Tahoma" was primal and fierce at times, while the new work, without at all renouncing the raw and wild aspect of black, highlights the emotional ups and downs that served as the bridge in the previous work between a more distinct "metal" section and a more folk one. I almost dare to say that, in the way they play, the band has ventured almost to the borders of post-rock (which, anyway, constitutes, in my opinion, one of the roots of Cascadian black), starting from acoustic arpeggios that sum up, grow, overflow, and burst into electric riffs with an engaging emotional drive.

To sum up, better or worse than "Tahoma"? A tie, two sides of the same coin, the weaknesses of one work corrected by the other and vice versa. The great heart of these guys must be acknowledged; though not revolutionizing anything in a genre that, although young, has already said much about its personality, they have managed to give their fans and more generally the listeners of the scene an intimate and nocturnal work, considered, reflective and rewarding, perhaps less immediate than its predecessor, but one that will undoubtedly provide emotions to those who know how to make it their own.