• Rating:
Second (and last) work for this German band, released a year after their debut "Ashore The Celestial Burden" and from which it diverges in a shocking way.
“Mission,” which introduces the album with a certain determination and consistency, leads us to “Dead In Love” and “Of Sceptre Their Ashes May Be,” two songs that while staying true to a sound texture sometimes arpeggiated and dreamlike, offer a rhythmic structure, almost walking the first, more aggressive the second. Continuing in what seems like a journey towards an indecipherable mirage and not a succession of separate episodes, it moves to “Mechanismeffects,” the fastest song on the record in which the double bass rules, especially in the finale. But right at this point, the journey takes on a magical and dreamy character: “Fatehistory” begins with the dialogue between 'the prophet' and 'the truth', the apocalyptic and mysterious tones produce sounds that tend to disperse, the voice of Christian Martens (almost unrecognizable compared to "Ashore The Celestial Burden" from a year ago) takes on increasingly calm and less violent tones. The musical mosaic that makes "Diana Read Peace" a varied and unpredictable album is further enriched with opposing episodes, “Peace in My Hands” lives on moments of whipping anger broken by instrumental parts that slow down although even the finale is crescendo; “My Repertory Of Grey” is even more uncertain in its interceding between guitar arpeggios and pauses, the splendid instrumental “The Mindartist” and “In And For Nothing” have an almost thrash flavor, with the drums always highlighted (another difference from the previous album).
It reaches the conclusive act with the majestic “Pandemonium” (the city of hell by Clive Barker), a song that deserves a separate review, with its 9 and a half minutes in which the typical initial doom-metal cadence soon gives way to an almost whispered singing, the guitar phrases majestically steal the scene creating a laconic and distant atmosphere, dispersing and unraveling in melodic games as wonderful as they are purposeless, only to reconnect in a powerful finale in which (and it's the only time) Martens' vocal timbre returns to being the same as "Ashore The Celestial Burden".
The conclusive outro “Myth” leaves us dazed by an album that we probably do not fully understand and that perhaps is made to hide behind an aura of timid magic and blurred visions.
The album is technically perfect, the guitar solutions and the structures of almost all 12 tracks are set in ad hoc, yet... something is glimpsed and unsettles us among the magma of notes that serves as the background to this (in my opinion beautiful) album, but it is not the typical sadness of classic Doom, nor the refined symphonic-compositional sophistication of orchestral Gothic. A melancholy can be glimpsed that slowly makes its way through all of "Diana Read Peace", and that delivers a musically accurate work (at times even excessively, especially in the search for 'instrumental difficulties') and deeply imbued with a fatal awareness that vanishes along with Dark Millennium, of which nothing more will be heard.
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