Theatre Of Tragedy
Velvet Darkness They Fear

THE REVIEW

It is likely that this album appeals only to me and a few others, and it is also possible that I have constructed an entirely intimate and subjective archetype for myself, but if I have to write only about things that are agreeable and accepted by everyone, then I would have to deny the little passion and conscience that I have left. So, even though it's perfectly clear that talking about Theatre of Tragedy, and doing so within the confines of a review that's already been written and digested by those who have paid attention to it, is like navigating a minefield.

Like many historic bands of certain "contaminated" and "contaminating" genres, Theatre of Tragedy eventually met the fate of the mouse that believes it must dare a bit too much against the cat: crushed by their own reputation, heavy and respectable with their first albums, only to blissfully tumble thanks to choices or perhaps artistic errors that definitively marked their stylistic and commercial downfall (in silence).
One cannot live forever on past glory, that's very true, but, with this beautiful work, T.o.T. managed to surpass, albeit slightly, the very good performance of the first (and eponymous) album: all the parts that make up this work are in their place according to a precise, thoughtful, fascinating, and eccentrically sad purpose.

In more than one track, you can still find the best Doom elements of the genre, but intermingled with these, gothic nocturnal and weeping phantoms reign, and then here's the graceful and delicate voice of Liv Kristine that intertwines with a growl that is not extremely fierce but certainly structured to be distressing, from her male counterpart Raymond I. Rohonyi. Here are decadent and claustrophobic dialogues from bleached and forgotten films that intertwine with instruments that draw, with their strength and harmony, smoky and martial atmospheres imbued with the "tragic" spirit, which was the very promoter of the fame and success of T.o.T.

And it is disarming and always painful, albeit pleasant, to listen again to the nine songs on this CD. Tracks that hold many nuances, many sensations each different from the other, like in a kaleidoscope in which to lose oneself and never find oneself again. From the very first "Fair and 'Guiling Copesmate Death" with its slow and measured attack that, oxymoronically, gives way to the sweet and introspective singing of the female counterpart, to then dissolve into the more leaden and tedious male softness, up to resulting in a brilliant interplay of growl and sweetness, like a deadly game: beauty, even if mysterious and with a vague dangerous scent, and ferocity measured and trapped in a universal and objectifying dismay.
In addition, all the songs wander in the elaborate and impure chiaroscuro of atmospheres soaked with sickly dawns, of nocturnal stars illuminated by a light that annihilates them, of cruel and atrocious opiate venoms, but served in the most exquisite golden and opalescent style.

And so, losing oneself in the difficult-to-understand and archaically and ancestrally written lyrics (and it is not an exaggeration; read them to believe), in the guitars that often and willingly become spacious and dreamy to give space to the violins or keyboards, in the more "bohémien" and grotesque meanderings of the countless contexts that this record holds, is a sweet demise that never ceases to occur. Always better, always quietly, but always, in the background, that exhausting charge that makes each composition a small gem: "Bring Forth Ye Shadow", "And When He Falleth", "Black As The Devil Painteth", "On Whom The Moon Doth Shine"; just to name, in my humble opinion, the most fleeting and precious. Those that irreversibly hunt in the hidden limbo of our primitive characters and refute all their colors, smells, deformations, and pains, as if they were, ultimately, distant and weeping parts of a lost and blurred soul, sad and abandoned because forgotten, invisible to the eyes and deaf to any noise, because resigned to its most inevitable destiny.