Fourth job for Americans Seven Spireswhich come onto the market under the aegis of Frontiers Recors with a record that right from the cover promises to be the darkest and darkest of their ten-year career. Over the years, the Boston group has been able to distinguish itself for a hybrid style, between power, symphonic metal and black metal incursions with screams and growls on double bass drums and alternating picking. An aggressive but also refined and elegant team, thanks to the study of the prestigious members Berklee College of MusicThe band is led by Jack Kostoguitarist as well as producer and main arranger, ed Adrienne Cowana name already known to fans of symphonic metal as the live singer of Avantasia Of Tobias Velvetas well as the main voice of the dei project Sasha Paeth’s Masters Of CeremonyThe album’s lineup also includes bassist Peter de Reyna and from the drummer Chris Dovas who after recording the album left the band to dedicate himself permanently to Testamentwho took over from a certain Dave Lombardo. For this reason, officially, starting from the promotional photos, today the Seven Spires they are formally composed of only the first three artists mentioned.
We enter the fortress – called home, of “A Fortress Called Home”. The title these days makes one think a bit of a message about Elden Ring, but let’s not digress. If in the past the Seven Spires were partly accused of undergoing too many influences without ever taking a definitive direction, oscillating in a somewhat uncertain and verbose manner between symphonic moments, virtuosity and black metal passages with the growl flaunted by the extraordinary voice of Adrienne – I personally wrote it since the time of the first album, “Solveig” (2017) – despite some digressions here and there, between a “Succubmb” it’s a “Lightbringer” the band… has decided not to care and continue on this path. But with stubbornness and courage.
The result of this choice is the album in question in this review.A Fortress Called Home” is a long-winded record, as granitic as the fortress illustrated on the cover, which after the eponymous intro with an ancient flavor immediately throws at you a brick of almost eight minutes, “Songs of Wine-Stained Tongues” (a very original title, for a genre that is all too often stereotyped), a roller coaster of emotions and unexpected events, cinematic and epic, in which the voice of our hero also enters the scene Alexander Conti (Trick or Treat, Twilight Force) to duet with Cowan, with whom they shared the stage during a recent tour. An elaborate and not very immediate song, decidedly unusual as an opener, which leaves room for the single “Almosttown”, much more catchy in the melodic lines, with a typically gentle refrain as per the Cowanian manual, but which does not exempt itself, like all the other songs of the lot, from going through a darker moment in growl, which accompanies us in a crescendo up to the solo of cost. Very interesting.
The power moments that once led the band to be assimilated with groups like the Kamelot seem to diminish, in favor of a nihilistic and oppressive symphonic black, like mid-tempo “Impossible Tower”, or the very tight “Architects of Creation”, among the strongest songs on the album, in which the band turbocharges their style Cradle of Filth with the NOS, with a very tight rhythm section between drums and bass lines, to slowly reach Adrienne’s explosive scream which acts as the chorus. Remarkable.
Other songs that definitely deserve a listen are the dreamlike “Love’s Souvenir”, which transports us from the drunken shores of a tumultuous dream to the abyss of the worst of nightmares, the caustic “Portrait of Us“, which adopts the band’s most melodic styles and the following “Emerald Necklace” (of Boston), a quasi-ballad with a Celtic flavor complete with choirs, bagpipes and strings that grows in intensity with an extraordinary performance by Cowan, underlining the lyrical and compositional complexity of these young artists from Massachusetts. A complexity that risks also being the weak point of the work, characterized by songs that average around five minutes in length.
We conclude the discussion with the single “The Old Hurt of Being Left Behind”, to underline the variety offered by the band (starting from the titles), another single definitely representative of the platter, more pirate-like that almost recalls the Moon arm (this time with chamomile, though!), in which the band proceeds with the final assault before saying goodbye.
“A Fortress Called Home” is a record that should be appreciated first and foremost for the courage with which the band continues to explore new artistic and compositional routes without prejudice, eschewing the easy labels with which the market is now saturated: its structural nature requires multiple listens to be fully appreciated , and we are certain that the undertaking will not be guaranteed to all adventurers. A stubborn, recalcitrant album, which for an instant offers you the flicker of a luminous melody and then immediately hides it behind a heavy blanket of impenetrable darkness. The impression upon listening is that of a heartfelt, suffered, mature record at the right point, very personal in the themes covered and in the style adopted which strengthens the identity of a band by its nature multiform and multifaceted, with a pulsating black heart enclosed within the imposing walls of a fortress – called home.
Luca “Montsteen” Montini
