The Gathering
Mandylion

THE REVIEW

Are you lovers of gothic and romantic sounds and, at the same time, do you like slow and rhythmic guitar passages in full doom style?

Well, if you mix it all with one of the most enchanting female voices ever heard, you get “Mandylion” by the Dutch band The Gathering.
Anneke Giersbergen's voice is unique and different from many of her colleagues devoted to the same music genre, characterized by a more classical, almost chamber approach to their vocal tones. Anneke, instead, excels in qualities such as sweetness and softness in her vocalisms, without exaggerating her tones to the point of self-indulgence, but maintaining her gentle grace in all sound passages, both high and low.

This difference, perhaps, finds its reason in her different repertoire compared to other vocalists from many other bands who grew up studying opera and classical singing. The singer, in fact, was recruited by the members of the band at that time after watching one of her concerts held in a pub, where she played together with her jazz group. This, mind you, happened around the mid-90s and not recently. This just to say that The Gathering is one of the first shining examples of a band led by a woman in a universe, that of gothic metal, later gothic rock, characterized, as in all rock and metal in general, by a crude and closed chauvinism.

“Mandylion”, besides being perhaps the masterpiece of their discography, is certainly one of the most beautiful albums of the last decade in the genre. An album in which melancholic and romantic atmospheres created by keyboards echo in the background, where slow riffs of the rhythmic parts insert themselves, never monotonous and heavy, but always pleasant. Starting from the opener “Strage Machines”, the listener is captured by the melody of Giersbergen's singing, by the poetic background atmosphere produced by the sound of the keyboards, and by the cadence of guitars and basses that accompany it throughout the album, reaching its peaks in the following “Elèanor”, characterized by a masterful bass line and an incredibly suggestive instrumental part, in “Motion # 1”, where the delicate progress of the keyboards strikes as a counterpoint to a very cadenced rhythm, in “Leaves”, distinguished by a dreamlike atmosphere that is hard to forget, especially in the arpeggios and guitar solo, and in “Fear the Sea”, a song that stands out from the others for a faster and heavier approach. The highest point of the album, in my opinion, is to be found in “Sand and Mercury”, where a faster first part particularly enhanced by the contribution of the piano is followed by a slower and psychedelic one in which Anneke's poignant voice emerges.

In conclusion, this album is an excellent recommendation for those who want to approach a genre that is currently, unfortunately, experiencing an unhappy and uninspired period.