Katatonia
Viva Emptiness

THE REVIEW

Look beyond. 
Beyond the surface of worlds colored with fake wellness, beyond the veil of hypocrisy of the plastic man, made of plastic needs, to realize how gray is the lost color of certain existence, how empty is the inexhaustible sense of actions-experiences-memories without a past that comforts, that restores.
Finally closure.
Tormented expression through symbols, words of rock and fragile earth in sounds of lucid harmony, always sought, always desired.
This is catatonic hermeticism, the invisible tool of those who have preferred to contemplate sincerely and wistfully their own inner universe, a reflection of multiple external realities, behind the screens of a dark and complex Rock/Metal, in the attempt to explore the abyss of senses and certainties, the desolate awareness of the impossibility of being fully serene, fully true.
So there's nothing left but to contemplate the void, not as nothingness but as the absence of emotion and perception of life, a raw and insurmountable wall of protection against the disillusionment of everyday life.
In the world of Katatonia, a Swedish group considered pioneers of once extreme sounds related to the Gothic-Doom-Death Metal style, all that "woe of living" that certain symbolist-decadent poetry has represented with exact grandeur materializes, and which certain chanters of hermetic delirium and irreparable decay, like Tool and The Cure, have brought to complete essence, a torrent of sensations here relived and sensitized within the bounds of an indissoluble and ingenious text-music embrace. 
There are no geometric shapes that can define and contain the void of existence, so the entire album is a dark and mysterious journey, through the impervious roads of Rock and Metal, where acoustic, electric, and electronic sounds blend and mix, following an unpredictable yet sensible logic, where loss is tangible, where pain becomes flesh, but never explicitly.
Everything is symbol, everything is a mediation of color, a controlled gray explosion in the cold of darkness.
Often melodic vocal lines seem to enchant the listener like a lullaby, while the guitars, now hard now gentle, paint frescoes of rare beauty, in an almost mystical cloak of surreal atmospheres, always changing, always different, amidst the disorienting highs and lows of a perfect and evocative bass and drums.
Someone has defined this Progressive attitude, but here there is no technical exercise for its own sake, here all technique serves the senses, thoughtful interpretation serves the ideas.
Describing individual songs, cutting like a mosaic the complete and structured painting of this work, would be a crime that too many have already perpetrated.
Viva Emptiness is a journey into true and sincere darkness.
A journey that feeds on senses, not simple and direct emotions, which is why it will be challenging for those who feed on sweetened "gothicity" and pretentious and redundant "alternative".
A difficult journey.
Like life.