Genre: Melodic Black Metal
Label: Independent
Line Up:
First full-length by Valadier. After their debut with an EP, threw themselves headlong into a work that can confer a more carnal identity.
The cover artwork, created by Silvana Massa, makes the band's concept quite clear: epic medieval battles and ancient tales of that era.
It starts with the intro of "Under the Skies of Gehenna", capable of transporting you to a battlefield, it ends in silence, after sounds of dark percussions that start, first with a single guitar, and then arrive in front of a wall of compact full-bodied sound generated by the rest of the instruments.
The voice, definitely appreciable, is acidic and malignant, perhaps the sound penalizes it slightly by suffocating it.
In conclusion, the song is enriched by Gregorian chants that accompany a moment of pathos, a very engaging solution that is found in other tracks.
While listening, moments of pure assault alternate, almost reminiscent of the Marduk of Opus Nocturne, riffs scattered from song to song, like little gems that are easily imprinted in the mind.
The interludes of female singing in Italian are also appreciable, usually not easy to digest, in this proposal they dampen the tension and add something magical.
The drums do their own thing, being programmed it lacks that feeling that makes it come alive, but it was written still making it in line with the rest of the album.
The choirs, often present, are in most cases a support that enriches these tracks.
Between one piece and another there are almost always interludes that, through flutes and similar sounds, reproduce the culture of that era, like screams in battle; this stylistic choice, in my opinion, extremely dampens the fluidity of the album as a whole.
Among the tracks worth mentioning are “Through the Blackwater Valley”, sung in Italian, full of pathos, “In the Sign of Stygian Watchers”, for the female vocal passage, and the aforementioned initial track.
Dario "l'Omega il Rakshasa" Checchi
