Synful Ira
Between Hope And Fear

I absolutely have to thank Synful Ira and the person who got me their album; it had been weeks since I slept so well! Let's start from the beginning though, as I think there will be very few people who know this band, so introductions are almost mandatory.

Synful Ira was born in 2007 with the tedious goal of being a cover band for groups like Nightwish, Within Temptation, Evanescence, and similar. With this guise, they presumptuously release an album and a DVD, a choice that in my view is pointless and detrimental! It's one thing to form as a cover band, but to even release material seems at the very least laughable! Then something changes, Synful Ira decides to get serious, they work on their own material and in the summer of 2012 they release this “Between Hope and Fear” through Logic (Il)llogic Records. Although the band is currently practically unknown to most, it is worth noting that it includes two significantly established personalities; one is Marco Renzi, the drummer, already active in the very boring Absynth Aurea and the other is Fabio Balducci (the mind behind the Synful Ira project), better known as the guitarist of the gaudy (but nevertheless loved) Ancient Bards.

With introductions done, we can get to the crux of the matter; “Between Hope and Fear” is an album devastatingly boring, without a hint of originality, moving plainly between the pop sound of Evanescence and the garishness of the latest Lacuna Coil, thus creating an overwhelming feeling of “already heard.”

From a purely formal point of view, this album might seem successful; the image is right, the production too, everything is in its place, but making a school-like comparison, formality is for the teacher's pets, for the well-behaved students, for the craftsmen; artists are something else, they are not formal, they are extravagant, innovative and outside any schema, they are the ones who sit at the back of the class and live in their own world, because what they have before their eyes is boring and too narrow for their mind. From this point of view, Synful Ira are the teacher's pets, certainly not the back-of-the-class kind.

The problems with this album are many, the first of which, even though you might not guess it, is the production: it is clean, too clean, antiseptic, tremendously artificial and plastic, there is no kind of dynamism in their sound, it's practically as if the tracks were played by a computer, lacking any kind of emotion. The second problem is undoubtedly Letizia’s voice, which although technically gifted on one hand, on the other manages to have the emotional interpretation of an ornament rendering any track tremendously soporific. Additionally, the situation is further aggravated by the presence of numerous refrains without any bite and instrumental parts almost always serving no purpose other than to accompany the voice, never standing out, so much so that after a short while, all tracks start to resemble each other and the urge to turn off the stereo and stash the album away in some forgotten drawer becomes strong, very strong! The only moment where the instrumental parts take over is during solos, but this is not at all good, as they too tend to all resemble each other and often fall into unnecessary and annoying technicalities. I prefer to skip over the frequent keyboard solos, which have a sound so horrible and annoying that I don't even want to waste time writing about them.

In conclusion, Synful Ira offers an annoyingly pop Gothic Metal (tracks like “New Love” make this blatantly clear), devoid of any personality and originality! Fabio Balducci and his fellows do not intend to put themselves on the line whatsoever, they have no intention of taking risks, they play it safe, aiming for the “verse-chorus” structure, and for that they sound outdated and useless.

From what I can read online, a good part of the industry critics appreciated them, I disassociate myself from these opinions, I go against the current! The point is that in Gothic Metal, currently, a mindset that rewards originality and knocks down banality has yet to develop, but I do not follow the currents of thought, I only look at the facts, and they tell me that Synful Ira is a failed case.

Boring beyond measure.