Cadaveria
The Shadow's Madame

Cadaveria is the ex front-woman of Opera IX, an epic-black metal band considered among the best in our nation. Marcelo Santos, drummer, is the former voice of Necrodeath, another important band that has remained vital for twenty years.

The two therefore know both death metal and black metal well and seize the opportunity by combining their experiences to give life to a new entity, which at first glance seems to take inspiration from Cradle Of Filth, perhaps due to the vampiric style. Doom and Gothic merged together, but the final product is not as smooth and depressing as the pioneers of these two genres might have wished, rather rough and raw, aggressive and polluted because it is created under the use of black and death techniques, which give space to arrangements of classic heavy metal.
A somewhat complicated and daring formula, which has slipped beyond expectations; in fact, being difficult to achieve leads to decent results for a project that could have been excellent. Simply put, death prevails over everything that was supposed\could have been. The songs are therefore sprinkled with somewhat forced and monotonous elements, repeatedly recycled, but full of will.

All this remains, however, a powerful and catchy album. The work is full of keyboard arrangements that impregnate everything with a good dose of epicness typical of some noble and ancient portrait, full of faded occult secrets. When the turntable needle touches the black surface of the vinyl, the friction produces the original "Traviata" by Giuseppe Verdi, soon transformed into an even more unsettling version of its nature.
It must be said, in fact, that Cadaveria has a truly lacerating clean singing, aggressive and loaded like two canines sunk into a neck, and "Spell" with which the album announces itself immerses us in a night atmosphere infested with panic, where the guitars torment the background with heavy and hard riffs. The tempos change often, and the drums have not very coordinated speed shifts accompanying the vocal scratches of a wild female voice.

The lyrics are very interesting, absolutely not trivial, containing artistic and historical expressions in a particular language, almost to be deciphered. "Declaration of Spiritual Independence" has a very animated rhythm, and a nice game of background guitars that compose a spiral on which the voices alternate. "In Memory Of Shadow's Madame", has very fast drumming, and the slight keyboard incursion is barely heard next to the much heavier and nastier guitar. "Circle of Eternal Becoming" is cadenced with a particular singing style, while "The Magic Rebirth", has a mystical air and deals with black magic as a solution to expand the boundaries of the human mind.

In conclusion, we have an album to try with particular attention, a collection of seven songs quite similar to each other but that nevertheless can be enjoyable if taken separately. "Black Glory" is certainly the most decadent and the darkest, with a typical thrash air; ending with "Absolute Vacuum" with interesting distorted guitar solos and a particularly black atmosphere with enchanting verses.
There are those who have particular tastes and would endure listening to the entire CD multiple times, for me there is nothing I haven't heard in other bands, but that doesn't mean it's a bad album, as I said: worth trying... it leaves many doubts.