Novembre
The Blue

November 2007 (... and when else??) sees the release of the latest masterpiece by the Italian band Novembre titled "The Blue".

Carmelo Orlando, the drummer brother... and associates, release their second album with the Peaceville label, a year after the previous "Materia," which registered their highest sales and significantly contributed to increasing their international visibility.

Since that "Wish I Could Dream It Again..." released back in 1994, the evolution has been truly impressive and demonstrates that their success is not just based on a few fortunate inventions but on a compositional talent and musical prowess that is manifested in each album to an ever-growing audience for this extraordinary band from Rome.

 Novembre has been defined as a Gothic/Death Metal band, and only in recent years have they been labeled as a Progressive band, which has led many to compare them to Opeth rather than Katatonia (with whom they have toured)... however, it is difficult and limiting to categorize them within such genres and subgenres given their musical uniqueness.

In any case, since the album "Classica" in 2000, Novembre has been continuously perfecting certain stylistic elements that make their music unmistakable to the ears of any listener.

This latest work "The Blue" does not betray expectations and already presents itself at first listen as a descendant of the closer "Materia," "Novembrine Waltz," and "Classica" indeed.

The ability to blend melancholic atmospheres with an impressive sound power, captivating, enveloping, and hypnotic melodies, majestic rhythms, and sudden time changes, a chameleon-like singing between "scream-growl" and clean hovering voice almost in a "neo-melodic style" (... if I may) makes their music, as I mentioned before, quite original and uncategorizable.

The album is more characterized, compared to its predecessors, by an enveloping, captivating, and hypnotic sound texture, largely thanks to the heavily distorted and reverberated guitars, which often combine in polyphonies, almost creating the impact of an entire orchestra, other times opening into beautiful arpeggios of clean and distorted acoustic and electric guitars (often overlaid to provide a greater sound blend); the drums are powerful but less present and noisy, almost evanescent, yet very technical and capable of supporting and marking each variation in the tracks.

Each track is characterized by variations in rhythm and melodies/harmonies that make it all very interesting and keep the listener's attention... the tracks thus always feature non-linear or symmetrical evolutions, making it less easy to fix a track in mind and at first listen (but also subsequently) even easy to confuse one track with another! ... in short, this album is not easy to assimilate (unlike, perhaps, the previous "Materia" which is simpler and more immediate).

Notably, the album turns out to be quite homogeneous and each track calls upon the next in a very intimate journey through the 12 tracks.

Among the most interesting tracks of the album, I want to mention "Nascence" where the singer duets with a female voice, but also "Blueacracy" or "Iridescence" which feature more typically "progressive" openings in between... accents that strongly recall death metal are present in every track but are skillfully blended with "Dream" atmospheres or often particularly melodic with airy parts of remarkable beauty; also characteristic are the "blast beats" that overwhelm a couple of tracks like "Triesteitaliana"...

In conclusion: with this album, Novembre seems to have definitively constructed a new and original style that will likely influence other bands... only time will tell.