Saturnus
Paradise Belongs To You

These Danes, who for a certain period gave hope of being a promising force with sure impact on the Doom audience, an audience certainly known for its discerning tastes and expectations, as we all know, began by publishing their works in the style of more renowned and successful bands like My Dying Bride. However, what distinguished them (and has always distinguished them since) from being unlistenable clones was their extreme originality, combined with a talent that could truly make some producer jump from their chair, and with a creative flair that was never clichéd. This led the members to be regarded, even before their latest "Veronika decides to Die" was released after a long time, as "black entities" yet super-influential in a certain melodic and catchy genre, although slowed down and not denied, always firmly rooted in its original matrix expressed in the formula of "exasperating slowness-catacombic moods-creeping despair." However, to these necessary and indispensable ingredients, Saturnus added, at the time of this album’s release in 1996, many elements derived from Gothic, a flow that is not always and only just catacombic but also dreamlike and "stellar", a treatment of themes, in terms of songwriting, that is certainly original and intelligent.

And this is probably what made them, subsequently, a great cult band, fascinating and theatrical, referring to something that one never quite managed to fully understand in its senses. Their genre, in fact, too theatrical to appear "caustic" and aberrant as their tragic attitude might suggest, too light to be tied to more "Funeral" schemes, too detached from lyrical contexts to follow the already long trail of the aforementioned My Dying Bride, eventually settled on mysterious and intentionally unique shores, capricious yet not unbearable, determined, but not forced, indeed.

And then, you might ask?
And then nothing, we reply.
This "Paradise Belongs to You" needs to be listened to in its entirety, to absorb and explore all its facets, to let oneself first be led to the magical door of dreams that the chirping of birds (always present, and perhaps in certain cases a bit off-key) offers, to then delve into a morbid and declining world, certainly, but always veiled by a sweet and suffocating atmosphere, fascinating because it's multifaceted and never suggests boredom, supported, this is certain, by a melodic section that does not play its role in the classic sense, but entwines and blends with the ancestral and atypical moods from which it derives, at times standing out in terms of melodicity and expressiveness: an ever-present guitar leading through endless, apocalyptic, and never clichéd solos, of astonishing beauty and disarming poignancy, harmonizing with the deep but never brutal growl of the singer, who, expressing themes that can only be bleakly depressive, manages to create a particular halo around himself, is a find that we could at least call "original."

If on one hand, therefore, the continuation of fundamental Doom archetypes is followed with great interest and discipline, on the other hand, everything is tempered by a subtle and evanescent lightness, as if it were a whirlpool of water that suddenly appears and is then swallowed up by the natural flow of things.
And this, let us not forget, in a work that is indebted, in many and varied things, to the English genre par excellence, considering it not as a point of arrival from which to slavishly follow an anachronistic discourse that would surely feel "already heard," but as a starting point to enrich it, strip it of its most claustrophobic and unbearable aspects, and then present it again with a Pathos, a sentiment, which, I'm ready to bet, few in truth possess.

Episodes like the first song, indeed "Paradise Belongs to You" which utilizes a strong keyboard component to then flow into a slow-motion apocalyptic ballet, the second and more dynamic "Christ Goodbye" with its percussion and its cadence veiled with epicness then, the seventh "I Love Thee", perhaps the most fierce and suffocating of the lineup, the most properly Doom, the most atrocious and harrowing, which with its considered and eclectic changes suggests closing one's eyes and reopening them on days with a lazy sun not yet healed from winter, on drapes of sadness more tragic and refined than a piece of silk, on beautiful but disappeared memories, therefore more painful; these, in the end, only reinforce the conviction that those few but fierce who listened to it, concluded upon this album's release; namely, that they were faced with a band destined to become influential (as indeed happened in the years to come), and certainly not to survive by borrowing someone else's light, because so much, of immense and moving poetic foundations, this is already imbued.

And so, no other word is worth anything, only the listening, and the magnificence of the melodies that this band has always known how to deliver.