The Fall of Every Season
From Below

Take the doom of the Danish Saturnus in all its facets (that combination of desperate and strongly romantic anger that erupts with a cavernous growl fused with melodic architectures at the limits of the sharpest melancholy, expressed with a beautiful clean voice). Combine all this with the acoustic frameworks of Antimatter, annihilating in their simplicity but touching to the deepest shore of your heart. Finally, sprinkle it all with a cold wind that creates that Nordic, cold and fascinating atmosphere typical of Opeth (also acoustic). If by doing all this what you achieve is an exceptionally listenable doom, easy to digest because it is not heavy and oppressive, permeated by an incredible underlying melancholy and constituted by the alternation of measured anger and moments of deep reflection, well then you are close to The Fall Of Every Season.

We are in the presence of a one-man band from Trondheim, consisting of the talented Marius Strand, author of all the lyrics, melodies, arrangements, and personally responsible for the entire rhythmic and melodic section. He expresses his personal universe of ghosts and demons with a fragility and delicacy that is unique to the greats: listening to him immediately brought Saturnus to mind, who are also able to recreate a world of sweet suffering that is easily accessible to all, organized according to precise patterns and interweavings between sweetness and anger.

However, he certainly does not hide behind his inspirational figures and surprises us with great mastery and personality. Listen to the title track "From Below." A delicate arpeggio unfolds into a long distortion (raise your hand if you didn’t feel a shiver and didn’t recall certain moments from "Eternity" by Anathema), then collapses in on itself to originate the slow and mournful step of Marius's harmonious doom (what a contradiction!). The growl, as already mentioned, is cavernous and heavy, but it can be listened to with great ease and doesn’t disturb even those who are not very familiar with growl (and doom). Suddenly, the clouds part, and the sun peeks through, with the singer’s beautiful clean vocals, marking the beginning of a series of moments where the vocals alternate, in this track as well as throughout the album.

Two entirely clean vocal episodes: "Sisyphean" and "Escape Of The Dove," two acoustic parentheses created specifically to break a possible feeling of heaviness in the flow of the work: especially worth noting is the second of the two, a tiny gem (it’s quite short) of devastating sadness, a lament of love, a poem dedicated by the musician to his beloved.

The remaining two tracks, "The Triumphant Beast" and "Her Withering Petals" are two other lengthy slogs (especially the latter), endowed with an exhausting expressive charge that empties but, as already mentioned, does not clutch and oppress. Credit certainly goes to the variety imposed by the musician, who has skillfully rotated his sources of inspiration within even the same songs, creating a dense network of references that are nothing more than pale reflections of other groups.

The Fall Of Every Season is a project that must be followed, "From Below" is an album that must be listened to multiple times and savored, Strand deserves all our respect for having conceived such a work, to which, without a shadow of a doubt, I give the highest score. Revelation.