Forgotten Tomb
Negative Megalomania

I was waiting for the Forgotten Tomb at the threshold: hailed by magazines, concerts, and rave reviews, they had never convinced me, leaving me puzzled about a proposal that I found cold and academic, very formal and lacking in pathos. This album clearly overturns my judgment, not so much by illuminating the past, but by imagining a bright future. On January 8th, 'Negative Megalomania' was released, the fourth studio album for the band from Piacenza, which has now reached such maturity and economic well-being as to allow an album with long and majestic compositions, supported by a production never so clear and precise.

The first thing to note is the stylistic evolution that has affected the band in the post-Love's Burial Ground compositional period, an album in my opinion weak and lacking ideas: a new lifeblood invades the tracks, articulated and always inspired, never repetitive, finally full of that feeling I had not found in recent productions (something that made FT similar to extreme Wing Spites).

"A Dish Best Served Cold" bursts in forcefully, symbolizing the rupture with the band's past: the doom-black beginnings, which then evolved in the subsequent albums while always keeping Katatonia's work as a firm point, takes different directions here, contaminating itself with alternative reminiscences (I will explain later), flashes of post-metal, a certain thrashy way of conceiving black metal (mistakenly defined as "black'n'roll"). The reference, almost bordering on plagiarism in the opening riff, is the production that affected the second part of Shining's career, contemporary forgers of the European school of Depressive Black Metal, intent from their third album in a dirty and thrash reinterpretation of the genre, full as it was of mid-tempos, restarts, and references to what Carpathian Forest had done.

The result is better than the latest albums by the Swedes, which seemed devoid of the brilliant ideas of the first two albums to me; in this first song by the Italians, there is a perfect balance between fast moments and more reflective ones, pauses and outbursts, coupled with songwriting that finally removes all doubt regarding the group's qualities.

The rest of the album is composed of four very long tracks, all over ten minutes, but articulated to appear varied, fluid, and smooth; the album is structured to represent an ideal detachment from the extremism of the previous chapters. Typical of an infinity of bands is the return to Rock/Metal sounds, almost as if it were a tribute to the youthful listens that shaped the adolescence of these musicians: the Forgotten Tomb never overflow into hard rock territories, let it be clear from the beginning: however, they insert a myriad of references to a very '90s landscape, from the most refined grunge (and less "grunge") of Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, to the shift that characterized the "second" Katatonia, passing through inserts and riffs of healthy Sabbathian Heavy Metal.

The jewel of the album, not coincidentally placed in the center as a milestone and symbol of the ongoing evolution, is the self-titled track, one of the most beautiful songs I've had the chance to listen to in the extreme field: an infinity of variations and details make "Negative Megalomania" much more than a simple Metal song; it is the perfect coexistence of Rock and Extreme elements that gives the track that dirty yet dreamy air. The final section dominated by the soloist is beautiful, insisting with a prolonged riff that becomes a true concluding solo, melodic and melancholic in its intimate essence. If the technical level of the band remains always high but never flaunted, the truly surprising note is Herr Morbid's vocal performance: the usual screaming performance is good, without smudges and here more linear, less invasive towards the music; the brilliant thing is the massive presence of clean vocals that give the album a more "metropolitan" sense of pain, always less desperate and more melancholic. These clean vocal lines then know a truly significant variety, alternating between more recitative moments, to a ("No Rehab") or more voices ("The Scapegoat"), or engaging in more touching and rock performances (the title track), where the specter of a fully depressive Layne Staley hovers.

Notable are the guitar parts, both for riffs and solos: subtle and refined are the arabesques that are created between the solo and rhythm, sometimes doubled into multiple lines. All this contributes to giving the album a status of superior work that will hardly tire, displaying a sincerity that was absent, in my opinion, in the previous, more visceral but perhaps more mannerist albums.