Austere
To Lay Like Old Ashes

...and suddenly the road catches fire.

A gentle wind, not sharp, although not exactly warm (after all, it is autumn) pushes the leaves like a father guiding his little boy who is learning to ride a bicycle. It caresses them, charges them with strength but does not harm them, allowing them to be themselves, to detach and to cradle. Leaf after leaf, it seems like it's snowing: the sun touches them, ignites them and warms them, while their swirling becomes increasingly unpredictable, a harmonious and improvised dance. You look at the avenue: it no longer exists as you knew it, covered as it is by a carpet of leaves, a surface of reddish tones that is good for the eyes and the heart.

Your steps also encounter some acorns: you look up, and from the great oak in the distance, you see small brownish gems raining down, touching the ground and rolling down, piling up near the sidewalk. And then you recall "Antichrist", and you wonder if that raucous, unhappy, desperate, and disjointed cry you hear in your headphones is not the mournful lament of these little things, not the wailing of children who didn't make it and were forced by a Nature, in a Leopardian manner, to detach from their own mother.
Autumn is like that: a season of slowing down and decline, splendid and misunderstood, warming the eyes but creating a subtle layer of cold in the heart.

The Austere are like that: monolithic and heartrending, melodic and hypnotic, their post-black metal is not yet cold, it's a heap of ashes under which burns a feeble flame of revenge that warms the heart, but from the outside, you would never say it also has a taste of life (although the titles of their pieces and, in general, certain atmospheres smell of a passage to the afterlife).

"To Lay Like Old Ashes", undoubtedly a seasonal listening, to be enjoyed now, in these days, before the cold arrives, the real one, the one without hope. Before the orange leaves become a wet and dark mush, before the acorns rot and are swept away by the rain.