Darkend - Spiritual Resonance

This is the review of Darkend's Spiritual Resonance: other albums are 2010's Assassine (5 stars), 2012's Grand Guignol - Book I (5 stars) and 2016's The Canticle of Shadows (5 stars).You read well: this band was LEGENDARY. While the mythical Gothic/Black Metal rivalry of Dimmu Borgir/Cradle of Filth was showing signs of wear and progressive dam of their impact in their music business, this Italian sextet was reducing the world to ashes with a trio of enormous albums built exactly using the two bands, along with Emperor, Obtained Enslavement and Limbonic Art, as reference points. What these three bands lacked, Darkend exploited to the point of making it a signature move: less schizophrenic arrangements, far simpler and more dilated minor-key progressions with more space among the key changes, resulting in a slamming experience that's also glamorously accessible.There's little exaggeration on the three albums, which instead rely on pure substance, impeccable production and instrument balance and enough varied arrangements to suggest proper songwriting. Among blast-beats, slamming guitar/string heroics and shriek/growl/recited vocals, there's nothing that Symphonic Black enthusiasts can't appreciate. True, on Grand Guignol there are some less inspired Doom Metal moments and the third one has an opening cut that shreds with hyper-speed blast-beat like Cryptopsy at their fastest, but all were uniformly great.2019's Spiritual Resonance, instead, it's a disaster! Opener "The Three Ghouls Buried at Golgotha" starts with meditative "om" chants and going out for assaulting blast-beats with much less keyboard orchestrations, but "Scorpio Astraea High Coronation" is totally plagiarized from Marduk's "Funereal Dawn", only a tone higher. "With Everburning Sulphur Unconsumed" is a banal variation of the previous one, and "Vessel Underneath" sounds like a Horna outtake with a single semitone-based melody and a minimal mid-song change. "Hereafter, Somewhere" is the only great cut on the album, but its C/G-minor harmonies would be better suited to Wolves in the Throne Room, and "The Seven Spectres Haunting Gethsemane" seems like an Nargaroth/Deafheaven bandwagon jump, and ends an album that not only finds the band eschewing their previous Progressive/Death/Thrash Metal tendencies, but also seems the product of a different band altogether, which may be explained by some line-up changes.Highlights: "Hereafter, Somewhere", "The Seven Spectres Haunting Gethsemane".

Vampyr film!

Love Lindy-Fay..... Especially with Wardruna.

L'ho riascoltato pensando di sbagliarmi.....ma davvero avete fatto uno scivolone allucinante.....ma perché??????vi consideravo una band di culto.....e Ve lo dice uno che ascolta black dal 96...... tristezza

Great mix of Cradle of Filth and Rotting Christ. Bravo

Video brutale macabro... Stupefacente! Devo abituarmi alle parti lente del brano ma nel complesso è ottima

David grey

Fortemente e strepitoso!! Bravi, ragazzi!! Vi aspettiamo a Mosca, Russia

Nice!

TOP.

Darkend and Lindy-Fay Hella? Stunning!

Begotten is real

Sounds really killer!

A glass of salt water would of released that hairball easier.

Can you tell me which is the origin of the movies on your video?

BRUTAL

A masterpiece.

Спасибо за приятную мелодичную музыку m/