Graveworm
Collateral Defect

Absence of Ideas.

This is what I thought as soon as I finished listening to the instrumental piece "Memories" that closes this tortuous, monotonous, and unconvincing latest work by Graveworm. In recent years, willingly or unwillingly, they have managed to gain more and more prestige in front of a metal audience that here in Italy has now labeled them as one of the most representative of the extreme gothic metal scene.

Before listening to "Collateral Defect," I wanted to experience one of the inevitable and prestigious pearls they have released over their career: although they made it in a much more melodic and powerful form, the cover "Losing my Religion" by REM, this single song managed to symbolize them and make them as famous as possible. All the more, I realized when discussing with people with similar musical tastes that as soon as they are mentioned, it naturally leads to discussing this curious cover of theirs, made with particular accuracy and constituting one of the salient pieces of the positive "Engraved in Black" from 2003. Let's say that covers bring a lot of luck to this band because even live, the audience starts to get heard and warm up the evening only when they start introducing the first notes of a famous cover that they have managed to modify superbly.

And so it goes for this "Collateral Defect"! If it weren't for the cover "I Need a Hero" by Bonnie Tyler, I wouldn't say all, but almost everything, would be throwaway. In fact, if I forcibly had to pick one of the best songs they have offered, I would take "Fragile Side" as an example, romantic, sinister, dark, capable of making us live for a few moments in the most haunting and poignant depths ever, enriched, in the chorus, by clean, memorable, and rarely effective vocal lines. Let's move on to the many painful notes: we are facing a band that, with this latest album, shamelessly tends to get as close as possible to the multi-famous and nonetheless contested extreme gothic metal band from Ipswich: Cradle of Filth. Yes, the main problem is that they only represent the bad copy of a script that would equally not be something to take as an example and to ideally let it end up in the nearest trash can. If we are fans, we might certainly highlight their undeniable professionalism, with which they know how to optimize sound with great ease and tenacity, but at the same time, if we are much more objective than a simple fan, it should also be said that most of the tracks are based, as always, on a completely superfluous melodic Thrash Metal riffing, quite anonymous and devoid of personality, and on the even more overused alternation of superficial small and big voices, lacking the necessary punch to break through (not to mention their senseless monotony), and to which, obviously, I have always been completely impermeable.

In a nutshell, zero originality. But evidently, this matters little to record labels, because we know very well, to mention an example, that the band founded by Dani Filth is one of the most famous and "profitable" in gothic metal. However, we cannot deny that "Collateral Defect" is a product that will be left and abandoned along the shelves of a CD store; quite the opposite: it may appeal to many and be sold in large quantities, to spite the originality they proposed through the release of this last full-length. The main problem is that people don’t understand that we have already heard plenty of songs like these and they do not deviate one millimeter from what has been expressed during their career by the same Cradle Of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Old Man's Child, and millions of band and artists similar to them. So forget the word innovation which would have been possible only through the introduction of new dark vibes, sensational mystical and occult atmospheres, and innovative grandiose melodies that would have contributed to naturally drawing a smile from our mouths both towards this band and for the future that awaits us. Nonetheless, this new CD will bring further fame to Graveworm and will contribute to establishing them even more internationally, bringing another Italian band increasingly into the spotlight. Whether this is right or not is certainly not up to me to decide.