Manetheren
Time

He walked through the park on a sunny day like many others that were succeeding one another in that strangely mild early winter. The only sounds filling the air were those of his footsteps on the pebbles, the cries of some children playing in the distance, and the wind, whose breath whistled in gusts through the nearly leafless branches of the trees lining the road. To be honest, he felt somewhat strange, yet light, without many heavy thoughts, so all in all, why not, he felt good. And yet he felt a sort of block in his brain, like the one you experience when you try to think about infinite things or things beyond our comprehension... I don't know, like when you start thinking about a déjà-vu, and suddenly everything you're doing from the moment you started having those thoughts seems familiar, seen before, and you are gripped by a kind of sweet panic whose only way out is to escape that strange loop. In short, he was experiencing that strange sensation, which led him to repeat in his mind a single, unique sentence, whose words, by repeating them over and over, had merged together and had filled his mouth. He felt a gust of wind hit him, and suddenly he stopped: that phrase he had repeated endlessly in his head, he was now uttering, like a never-ending chant. And the funny thing is, he was aware of it, but couldn't (and didn't want to) do anything to stop.

He looked up: the park had now ended, and he had already entered the main street. His eyes climbed up the building in front of him, up to the top floor, and collided with the strong sunlight that partially burned his eyes. Then he saw strange shapes in the air: open arms, extended legs, floating. "Angels," he thought, but he didn't have time to finish this thought before one of these "angels" crashed at his feet, then another, and another. He didn't understand it, but the residents of an entire building were throwing themselves off the roof: one after another, in line like automatons, they took a step and hurled themselves into the void, towards the cold sidewalk. He was once again rooted to the spot in front of this gruesome spectacle, but his face showed no emotion, only his mouth continued, undeterred, to mumble those senseless words. Then a gunshot: a police officer nearby, also rooted to the spot and almost lobotomized, had shot himself in the temple. He walked over to the body, picked up the gun, and as if he were doing the most immediate and ordinary thing in the world, pulled the trigger. A new rain of bodies muffled the sound of the bullet passing through his brain, while the wind, which until then had blown not strongly but insistently, suddenly stopped, and silence returned to the street.

"Time" is the sound of madness, of urban alienation, of depression. The desperate abyss into which the American band Manetheren seeks to throw its listeners with their latest effort bears the hallmarks of the cities described by Amesoeurs, is madness depicted by Lifelover, and put into music following in the footsteps of American black metal masters like Weakling or Wolves In The Throne Room. Only here there's no exaltation of nature and a panic union with it: there is disorientation, yes, but a sense of helplessness, abandonment, and cold, there are these six scalpels that, one after the other, isolate your brain from the rest of the world leaving you there, petrified, to contemplate the bare reality of things. At the end of this long (over seventy minutes) marathon made of black metal accelerations, post-rock digressions, and more intimate moments, you can be reborn in two ways: either cynical, ruthless, and heartless, or driven by a renewed sensitivity, which will allow you to see the surrounding world with new and sharper eyes.