Mirrorthrone
Gangrene

Once upon a time in Switzerland, there were the Coroner and the Celtic Frost. Now there's also Mirrorthrone, the one-man band of Vladimir Cochet, a dark-haired genius as desperate as he is brilliant. This young man of eternal sorrow had already shown encouraging glimmers of talent in the two works prior to "Gangrene" (excluding those under "Unholy Matrimony," another project by the Swiss), namely "Of Wind And Weeping" and "Carriers Of Dust," in which, however, there was a harmful grandiosity and a deplorable inclination towards redundancy: in short, to cut to the chase, too much nonsense. In "Gangrene" (2008), however, these flaws begin to gradually fade, allowing us to enjoy the highest point reached so far by dear Vladimir.

About the album, what can I say? Well, of course, it's not music for everyone. In theory, it's Metal, but in practice, it's much more. This is not stuff for those metalheads with a monosyllabic vocabulary who compose vows with blood and insult the ladies in the waiting room. No, this is cerebral and dense music, like the jar of honey you brought to class claiming it was the professor's urine, intended for gentle and wise metalheads, the kind that go with corpse paint to sip tea with some old bigoted noblewoman. In short, right from the piano-dominated intro of "Dismay," I explored the deep sorrow of Vladimir's heart and made it my own. When, a few seconds later, the Swiss began to scream in full Black style as if he had found the bar closed, I felt a piercing pain in my chest, and I could no longer hold back the tears. I'm a crybaby, I know. But it doesn't matter: "Gangrene" wasn't designed for the giggling girls who trot in the sun listening to 50 Cent or the current Kylie whatever: it's a work to be listened to in front of a sepia cathedral, when the moon reflects on the lake like Narcissus, and the only other sound is the silver sistrums of the locusts.

Titanic tracks follow one after another without pause, to be enjoyed sullenly and secluded in a dusty corner, capable of ruining any joyful day, like the news that your girlfriend has discovered she's a lesbian, and constantly divided between orchestral and extreme. However, as mentioned earlier, the exaggerations and excesses of the previous works are ancient history: every moment, every single note is strictly functional to the architecture of the entire song, whatever it may be.

A pleasant and at times brilliant avant-garde work, to be enjoyed while stroking your long beard with a complacent and suffering air, feeling an insatiable hatred towards humanity. Too bad that the weak point is precisely the final track, "So Frail," but in the end, it doesn't really matter: what is really important is the improvement of this troubled soul, to whom I wish many good things and a future work of even higher quality. In the meantime, let's enjoy this symphonic tragedy where it's sweet to get lost.