vote
6.5
- Bands:
LARES - Duration: 00:27:38
- Available from: 12/04/2024
- Label:
-
Argonauta Records
Streaming not yet available
How many scars are we able to hide from the outside world, hiding behind a resilient smile? Starting from this question and in an attempt to put into music the discomfort felt in the last four years, Berlin’s Lares deliberately take a step back from the elegant blend of Isis-style post-metal and doom of their second full-length “Towards Nothingness” ( Argonauta Records, 2020) relying on the ambitious form of the suite.
An impervious road, the one chosen by the quartet, a decision resulting from an intense refinement work in a live setting and supported by the multifaceted Luca Leprotti (David di Donatello in 2021 for the film “Volevo Nascondermi” by Giorgio Diritti) at the mixer and by the expert Brad Boatright (Audiosiege, Portland, already mastered with Obituary and Corrosion Of Conformity) in the mastering phase, who opted for a more raw and markedly black sound.
“Et In Arcadia Ego” develops over twenty-seven minutes, ideally divided into three movements, which explore most of the extreme shores known to the visitors of this site: the first section opens with a menacing drone which is dominated by the percussion, as if announcing a storm and then flows into a furious black metal theme blown from the forests where Wolves In The Throne Room live, and then quietly immerses itself in the doom territories already explored by Ahab.
The second movement is objectively less successful, because the post-punk arpeggios that introduce it (as if The Cure of “Seventeen Seconds” had entered the studio by mistake) soon give way to a long and acidic digression of electric that has no a well-defined direction (the short black metal coda that closes it is of little use), while the third section touches on the funeral death doom territories of Funeralium, and then overflows, during the exhausting finale, into drone music.
Lares abandon us like this, in thin air, with the feeling of not having developed enough ideas for a complete album, but at the same time of having crammed too many into a single song, even if it lasted more than twenty minutes. “Et In Arcadia Ego” is however a courageous experiment that does not continue the comfortable path of previous works and which, despite some undeniable blank passages, leaves a healthy curiosity for the future musical direction of the band.
