Empyrium
Songs Of Moors And Misty Fields

The crepuscular, misty "When Shadows Grow Longer" opens one of the most underrated (but well-executed) albums of the 90s in the doom metal realm, "Songs Of Moors And Misty Fields" by the German band Empyrium. It's a medieval-flavored beginning, carried by flute, cello, piano, and voice, of brief duration (a minute and a half) but that already clarifies the band's poetics: the exaltation of Romanticism, of titanism, of impossible loves, of suffering and death seen as companions of life just like joy and love; it is an ode to the Sublime, to all that is immense in nature that frightens and at the same time fascinates man.

When "The Blue Mists Of Night" begins its long ride (made of continuous tempo and mood changes, poetic slowdowns and raging accelerations) it's like being in front of those landscapes so dear to Friedrich: imposing and majestic endless expanses made of snow-capped mountains, with fog and clouds below creating hypothetical and soft meadows. There is no rush and impetuosity, no resentment and violence, there is only an unmatched contemplative urgency, a permanent stasis created by the fear and terror that certain broad and boundless visions evoke.

"Mourners", very slow as traditional doom demands, both proud and subdued (thanks also to a clearly black-influenced voice, that of Markus Stock, a chilling scream that can also transform, as already heard in previous tracks, into a theatrical and poised clean), is another vision of the aforementioned painter. A slow line of people, in religious silence, bowed and weeping, proceeds softly towards what remains of a Gothic abbey placed next to a cemetery. A vague mist and a livid sky frame a quiet environment, where snow covers the ground and the tombstones aged by time and the trees, with claw-like withered branches, seem to have lost hope of seeing spring again.

"Ode To Melancholy", one of the most theatrical tracks on the album, is a bath in pure melancholy, a song lifted to a common feeling that grips all of us but does not necessarily need to be interpreted negatively. Musically there is little to say, the track faithfully follows the characteristics described so far in the previous tracks: slow, dramatic, at times almost bucolic, shifting in mood like a spring day.

Then we come to the first of the two best pieces of the entire batch, the classical "Lover's Grief", an ode to sad loves, a canticle that at certain moments brings to mind Leopardi's "Canto Notturno di un Pastore Errante dell'Asia", where a disconsolate shepherd asks impossible questions to a silent star, which rises in the evening and tirelessly follows the same path "Are you not yet tired of treading the eternal paths?" the man asks, who then reflecting on human ills and his life, wonders if she can ever help him. "(...) Perhaps you understand this earthly life, our suffering, our sighing, what it is; what this dying is, this supreme fading of semblance, and perishing of the earth, and the decline of every accustomed, beloved company." The shepherd's conclusion is very bitter and cynical, subdued like the end of the song, entrusted to a nocturnal piano: "perhaps in whatever form, in whatever state, whether in kennel or cradle, the natal day is fatal to who is born."

The conclusion of this masterpiece is entrusted to "The Ensemble Of Silence", the sum of what the Germans proposed in the five previous tracks. The beginning is a timid dawning, a quiet awakening accompanied by the sylvan flute, by a classical guitar, and by a whispering voice that has an ethereal quality. Slowly the pathos rises, up to the epic and dramatic sound explosion around the second minute, where a whirlwind of electric guitars, violins, wind instruments, and the alternating screaming/clean envelops and overwhelms the listener, who can only remain impassive and let themselves sink into these passionate and captivating melodies. The break halfway through the track is exceptional, a magnificent and deeply melancholic painting once again by Friedrich, a monk who, absorbed in his thoughts, placidly observes the sea that opens before him, a tiny figure that does not participate in the becoming of nature, contenting himself with accepting its immensity.

"Songs Of Moors And Misty Fields" is truly an excellent work, emotional and touching, a perfect translation of the romantic themes expressed by many artists (painters, writers, musicians) in the 19th century. I have quoted in this long review two of those I admire and appreciate the most, but I am convinced that an album like this has such a strong expressive force that it can engage every type of listener, dragging them on a journey through images, writings, and music that belong to them and that know how to move them the most.