Warning
Watching From a Distance

Think about when you wake up in the morning and, with barely open eyes, you can't hold back bad thoughts. Negative, pessimistic, and nihilistic thoughts. Or when at night (even late night) you cannot sleep and resign yourself to the disappointments you've experienced in life and try to discover the reason for these disappointments, plunging into a pitch-black abyss and wondering why you're there, lying on the bed, tormenting your brain with questions about why your mind is generating these thoughts. But the truth is there isn't a clear reason why these mental elaborations occur, or rather, there is a reason, but it's so complex, private, and deep that even we struggle to understand its meaning and the reasons why these thoughts arise.

In these moments, everyone faces their suffering in their way. Some seek refuge in the company of relatives and friends, and some, by choice or compulsion, remain inside and choose music as their only travel companion. And in this case, it depends on musical tastes; some take refuge in De André (Tutti Morimmo a Stento), while others turn to other music genres like Dark Ambient, Black/Doom, Funeral...

I was in such a moment myself when one morning I started playing this album, Watching From a Distance by Warning. And a world opened up to me.

Warning, born in Harlow in 1994, don't play any genre I've mentioned before but are devoted to old-school Doom, without growl, scream, violins, or choirs. However, this band manages to give the same emotions stirred by artists who play very different and far more extreme genres. This is due to the slow, steady, and omnipresent drums accompanying a melancholic and mournful guitar that weaves the fabric of each song, enriched by the cacophonous and aptly suited voice of the singer. A nasal and monotonous voice that perfectly conveys the feeling of mournful disorientation and resignation that the listener wants to feel.

The album consists of five tracks, each averaging ten minutes in length, for a total duration of just under fifty minutes. The work opens with the explosion of a guitar that enters, first in the listener's heart and then in their ears with gentle and gracious intrusiveness. Then the voice kicks in, and from here, we understand that everything we were looking for in those moments of pessimistic introspection, we have finally found. We gradually reach, accompanied by the music, a resignation with a bittersweet taste, because even though the "black fire" that was consuming us before is soothed, the issues that led us to the emotions of that moment will not disappear and, at most, will change shape and substance, causing us to once again fall into the abyss we were in just a few minutes earlier.

However, the work also has some negative aspects. First of all, the band adds nothing to the musical and stylistic canons of classic doom, and consequently, the album might sound like something already heard to those more accustomed to old school doom. Secondly, forget about any self-serving technicality, any acceleration, any explosion of power or progression; every track on this work proceeds solemnly and with deliberation towards the end, making the tracks too homogeneous and, often, hard to distinguish one from another, making analyzing them one by one tedious both for me and for you who are reading; therefore, I recommend listening to this monolith only in specific moments.

Summing up this record, I would say that, despite some flaws, it is a good work also because of the great emotional impact it manages to deliver (I never would have believed I could find these emotions in such a non-extreme genre). I therefore recommend, especially to those who are not yet accustomed to this kind of doom, to make this record their own, to take their time listening to it, and to reserve it for those moments described earlier. In the end, you'll see that even you will be grateful to this unknown English band. 

Rating: 83/100