Thy Light
Suici.De.pression

The summer afternoon heat offers no escape, I can do nothing but sit on the floor with my back against the wall, staring into the emptiness around me, my head lost in a thousand indefinite problems, the usual worries, the usual tasks of the usual daily grind so devoid of meaning that it becomes distressing.

The only audible sound is the sizzling of the fan blades, which does nothing but blow hot air on me. From outside, indeed, you can hear young voices cheerfully shouting, but they are out there, in the heat, among the world and life. At this moment, however, I feel completely estranged from this world and, to be honest, there is a large part of me that would absolutely wish to have never been a part of it.

I get up, feeling the need to listen to music for various reasons: partly because I want to fully descend into the inner void I am already slightly perceiving, and partly to completely drown out the voices from outside. I look a bit through the music folder and my eye falls on a newly downloaded demo: "Suici.De.pression" by Thy Light.

Thy Light is a Brazilian one-man band revolving around the figure of Paolo Bruno who, in this CD, plays all the instruments, while the songwriting is entrusted to Alex Witchfinder. Formed in 2005, in 2007 they released their first and only release: "Suici.De.pression." As you can infer from the demo's name, this is one of the many (too many?) bands that play depressive black metal with songwriting centered on the theme of suicide (some even talk of suicidal depressive black metal).

But for now, I want to focus on talking about the demo's sound. It is a fairly well-executed blend of black metal and doom sounds, with evident references to Shining, Forgotten Tomb (especially from Songs To Leave), and in the lighter parts to Katatonia, all enriched with synths that are sometimes icy yet enveloping, contributing to dispelling the sparse atmosphere typical of records of this genre.

The work opens with an introduction played on an icy keyboard, only three minutes and the macabre dances begin with the subsequent "In My Last Mourning...". The song starts with a very slow guitar arpeggio, very cold, enveloping, and sad; a few minutes pass and everything calms down. But this is the calm before the storm; the rhythm will gradually become more sustained until, after almost four minutes, the arpeggios will give way to an icy riff that, nevertheless, will not lose its melodic vein. If there's one commendable thing about this record, it's that even in the most "pulled" moments it never loses sight of its melodic element, making it appealing even to those less accustomed to such sounds (always in relation to the genre, of course). The scream is typical of Burzum and seems directly lifted from "Songs To Leave" by the Piacenza-based Forgotten Tomb. The other tracks follow this blueprint, always alternating fast moments with slower, doom-like ones. The task of closing the album belongs to "...And I Finally Reach My End", a song that closely resembles the slow moments of the songs contained in "Halmstad" by Shining.

In short, the record possesses particular points of merit, such as the highly successful mix of black and doom sounds without overly diluting the melodic component.

The flaws, however, lie in the lack of originality of the sound, but being a demo (and I repeat, an excellent demo) this can be overlooked. The lack of originality, which is harder to overlook, is related to the themes the band addresses. I don't want to argue about whether it is right to talk about certain topics on a music CD, but it is undeniable that certain themes are "exploited" by many bands, probably to hide an otherwise evident lack of ideas during the text-writing phase.