Malasangre are from
Italy and they play a particularly grimy sludge / doom of sorts. The
band's musical direction shares the same bleak well from which bands
such as Electric Wizard, Methadrone and Drecksau spring from.
All
musical elements seem to close in on the listener, leaving him no room
for breath amidst this thick and imposing monolith of an album. The
tempo is just a few notches above funereal, but still zealously flirting
with funeral doom's austere tortoise paces. The album 'paints' a wide
canopy of grey-scaled backgrounds upon which their mammoth compositions
are laden, which invariably bear the raw and murky trademark sound of
the genre's purveyors.
The first track, "Sons", could well be the
musical essence of tragedy, as emanated by recent disasters such as
9/11; a news snippet of which is
amended to the final moments of the track. From there on, "Werewolf /
Echoes of the Past" takes over, strewn with a sentiment of a smoldering
incessant enmity, creeping beneath this angst-ridden musicianship which
perpetually urges to be heard; the allure of it (or the Tragedy perhaps)
is that it never is. It's like the far-distant woes of a doomed race,
crying in vain their wretched threnodies. A similar approach is followed
by
the third and final track, "Sharp Contemplation", which in addition is
intermitted by more clean parts of sheer, dank ambience.
Evidently
the album is not for the faint of heart; the dissonant and serpentine
riffing distorted in consonance with the gargantuan bass sound allow no
room for hackneyed sentimentalities exhibited by the more traditional
doom outfits. It is essentially a very uncompromising album, standing
aloof from other musical genres, bearing its own, personal musical
imprint. Now exactly which kind of listeners will be gratified by this
release is something indefinable; obviously the doom/sludge aficionados
among us are already wetting their pants, but in my estimates the
listening group should extend to a much wider circle.
(originally written for Chronicles of Chaos - 20/10/2005)
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