Todtgelichter
Angst

True Norwegian Black Satanic Krieg Metal and all that jazz? No. It isn't True. It isn't Norwegian but made in Deutschland, it isn't Satanic, and I threw in the word Krieg at random. But it is Black. Actually no, even more. Enough with the sterile Black that has remained the same since 1990, fruitful and innovative in those years, but the father of billions of clone offspring that have done nothing but kill a genre with their repetitiveness.

The Hamburg band offers something different, we perceive the alienation of ambient, the atmosphere of doom combined with vaguely post-rock annihilating inserts. Yet in all cases, the darkness and heaviness of Black are strongly felt, especially on this gray day of wind and rain as I write. But this time it's not in the Norwegian tundra, it's not in Schwarzwald that our mind is taken. Darkness is transferred into modernity, into our big cities, suffocated by the frenzy of the day, abandoned to themselves in suburbs emptied by nighttime desolation. We find ourselves in empty, eerie alleys of a day when the sun forgets to exist, where the wind doesn't whip your hair but only makes you want to go home, repeatedly asking yourself why you even went out. It's cold, quite, not too much, but enough to bother you, to make you scream enough, to crave a little light. But do we really desire it?

Among the notes of this album, no, we don't desire it. Or at least, I don't. I find myself completely absorbed by these notes, these changes of rhythm, these arpeggios, that even a glimpse of the sun would ruin the entire atmosphere. No track is trivial, all composed to chain together in a succession of small drops of emotion that always fall in the same place, creating a hypnotic circle, just like a drop repeatedly losing itself in the infinity of the sea. Clean riffs, mixed with buzzing guitars, silences, everyday noises, solos, maybe not very technical but absolutely capable of emptying the listener’s mind to sneak, insidiously, between the synapses.

And the voices? Scream, female voice, Scream, clean voice, Scream and more Scream. The female voice in the first track "Café of Lost Dreams" and the clean segments in other songs are like calm before the storm. It arrives, always. But it does not last. Nils' scream always comes back powerful and harrowing, without being excessively piercing, a scream of pain more than despair. The tracks often turn out to be strong, interspersed with more subdued and calm moments, the rhythm running through full and powerful sounds, well-balanced by a more than decent production. You don't need exasperating slowness to convey the broadest concept of loneliness, loneliness which here is not only transmitted to us but absolutely demanded. It's an album to listen to alone, at peace with the world, but not necessarily at peace with oneself. May the music help us dig inside ourselves, in my opinion, this is the task to which, what I define as the ultimate art, must fulfill. It must help us know ourselves, and maybe understand ourselves a little. Music can amuse us, but it can't and shouldn't be just that.

One of the best works of the past year. There isn't a track better than another, the album is a continuous and inseparable flow that must be absorbed in its entirety. Lose yourself in these 53 minutes and try to come out renewed, perhaps leaving behind the melancholy, letting it be absorbed by the listening just undertaken, ready to be hit by new emotions, overwhelmed by a wave of sudden Erasmus-like madness.