In recent days we published the review of Witherfall’s latest, Sounds of the Forgotten. Since I don’t have to write anything about it, I’d say that I dedicated myself between little and nothing to the album: a couple of distracted listens, with a low threshold of involvement. However, I can’t say that I found it bad.
Yet in the days that followed I stopped to reflect, quite a bit, on what was missing Sounds of the Forgotten or more generally ai Witherfall and to the metal bands of the present generations. I’ve had a chaotic week to say the least: meetings about photography, the dreaded end-of-year party at kindergarten, a twenty-year-old who smashed the back of my car and rear-ended me. Despite all this, I continued to reflect on the question at hand, waiting to grasp the so-called missing piece. Why, even if Witherfall release an overall acceptable fourth album, do I not give a damn? Since, I must add, all things considered, Witherfall is considered one of the best metal bands today, certainly second to Vulturehardly thirds to anyone.
They quickly gave me the answer Evilas soon as I put their latest album back on The Unknown.
You should know one thing: I listen to a lot of metal from the 2000s, but in the end I don’t listen to almost anything. It’s a question of longevity and serial stacking of record releases that I don’t even feel like delving into, otherwise I’ll end up off topic. I go on at length, and Roberto rightly points it out to me.
I listened again The Unknown of Evile for the simple fact that it was different from the others, and today no group shows the will to change even a single comma. Not even in the period in which five or six records are released, in the worst cases. The Unknown it doesn’t ape the old Metallica but rather the Metallica of changethose from 1991. It’s not a beautiful album, but I appreciated and assimilated it in a certain way.
The strong point of The Unknown lies in the fact that a group that holds zero ideas has suddenly changed course. That’s the missing piece.
Today’s groups, my dears, are not able to improvise, much less establish a path on paper. They go off and mock someone – and in 2002 I would have paid for a scene like this! – and end up producing more or less the same and identical album recorded at the beginning. There isn’t an evolutionary path that sees them create their most melodic, fastest, most technical, most disgusting record. It’s all one comfort zones from which they decide never to leave.
The Nevermore are mentioned so often, especially now in relation to Ghost Ship OctaviusCommunic, Silver Talon and precisely Witherfall. The Nevermore, although on this blog they do not find the favor of the majority current – ungrateful, bunch of pigs as well as shits – in the period of time that separated The Politics of Ecstasy from Dead Heart in a Dead World they changed everything they could change. Warrel Dane’s inner demons didn’t kill them alone, in my opinion theirs killed them comfort zonesinto which they sank a moment later Enemies of Reality or just starting from that.
Here’s the problem with today’s bands: they’re born ready and their first album is a great album, maybe even a real one Nocturnes and Requiems. The second one they do even better, but it’s basically the same thing. Then they cease to exist as ideas, and mix the typical components of their sound in equal parts, fusing them together in a senseless cauldron. Today everyone does this, groups of twenty-year-olds who seem more ready than the thirty-five-year-olds of the past, perhaps at the mercy of a manager or a record company; and groups of thirty-five year olds who we still find permanently on the same tile, not knowing exactly what the fuck to do with their music and their careers. And it happens even to the best. (Marco Belardi)
