Visthia
Reditus Conscientia

"Reditus Coscientia", the return to awareness, or knowledge, as you prefer, is one of the most fitting titles in the entire history of Black Metal, because by itself, even without explanations or special interpretations, it does justice to one of the most significant concepts of life, certainly, I'd bet my hand on it, the most important in the life of a "blackster" (assuming it makes sense to use such labels, but I'm proud of it nonetheless).

The Italian band Visthia arrives at their first full-length release with this album, even though their origins can be traced back to the previous era, even the last millennium; the band's members, about whom very little is known, owe their maturity to their long presence in the music world, even to the late '80s according to what I've read online. All this underscores how the usual issues faced with a debut are certainly diminished in this sparkling debut (even if given the prominence of gray and dark tones, this adjective seems out of place...).

We spoke earlier about Return to Knowledge and its close connection to a certain way of understanding Music and especially Life; I believe that the Awareness of what one does and thinks is the highest achievement in every person's life, as the world is still largely populated by people who act and think by echoing the actions of others, letting the media explain the right way to live, the clothes to wear, the people to talk to, and those to distrust.

Intelligent banalities aside, this concept linked to the individual journey towards Self-Knowledge/Awareness is what nourishes and sustains a genre like Black Metal, a (sub)culture before a musical movement. From the origins of the genre to today, both among musicians and supporters of the genre, a common line of thought seems to clearly emerge, linked to the breaking of social, legal, and human conventions to create an individual worldview, with a consequent rewriting of the cultural norms around which one's world revolves. Black metal as a personal and exclusively individual Weltanshaung then, in opposition to an external world populated by "others" with whom one practically has nothing in common (not that one should be in tune only with those who listen to this music...).

The album is placed among the Italian products that have been most talked about in recent months, from its release last year to the recent opening of the group's MySpace page, a true "case" among industry insiders, given the massive amount of contacts in the first week. The group manages to reinterpret the genre in their personal way, without surprising with daring formulas or excessive experiments, but taking from Black and other neighboring realities what is needed to shape a wicked and convincing sound, which presents no substantial novelties but will probably become a paradigm for the future (as has also been recently done in Italy by Vidharr, Locus Mortis, and Forgotten Tomb).

A good influence is Swedish school black, to which the speed of the solutions and the rhythm section are owed, found in most of the six tracks of the album; the wickedness of the album, rampant in certain passages, is corroborated by a certain coldness of execution, with a sound sometimes almost Post-Black, while it is attenuated (and this balance of weights gives value to the compositions) by the spiritual atmosphere felt among the grooves, which is very French school. A concoction that is not indigestible only due to the compositional skill and maturity of the group's members, already widely praised before.

Further quality is added by the choice to sing in Latin combined with the taste for experimentation that appears in the fifth track "Via Spinarum", which is slower and evocative, allowing an angry and suffering singing style to make its way through vaguely depressive melodies. It is precisely this union of Melancholy and Hatred, Passion and Gray that gives meaning to an album that already fully represents the concept of Black metal discussed at the beginning.

8.5/10