Eterna Rovina, Metamorfosi, Mexico, Silentium in Foresta Records, CD digipak limited edition, SIF072 (2016)
There really has been a tremendous explosion of atmospheric BM bands across northern and north-central Italy lately with many such bands combining black metal with post-rock, folk and dark ambient elements, and just as many going for a really epic and dramatic style of delivery. It’s important for new bands from Italy then to try to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack (because it’s such a huge pack now) with original ideas and music along with energy, passion and belief in what they do. So I’m going to be focusing on this debut release from Eterna Rovina, a solo project based in Urbino in north-central Italy, with a view to seeing if and how its all-rounder sole member F differentiates his offering from everybody else.
After hearing “Metamorfosi” a few times, I can say it’s an impressive and ambitious effort for a solo all-rounder debut. As might be expected, programmed percussion is used but F turns this to his advantage by not laying much stress on it overall: the guitars and singing dominate the music. (At the same time, having a live drummer would improve the music with more lively playing, greater flexibility and the energy that comes when two or more musicians are jamming together and bouncing ideas off one another.) The approach is to stick closely to the atmospheric BM style with a few deviations into all-synth ambience verging on space drone, and extract as much drama out of it as possible to express F’s concerns about nature and humanity. The guitars have a very layered grinding sound that gives the impression of a huge string army powered by mighty corrosive acid-battery charges. The singing is a mix of grim and fairly clean and at times F gets carried away into the realm of opera, to the point where on one track he even drags in a female opera singer (or a sampled recording of such a singer) to perform briefly.
While the bulk of the recording is consistent technically, there’s not much here that lifts “Metamorfosi” above most other Italian atmospheric BM that I’ve heard. Like too many other Italian bands, ER can’t resist bringing in operatic drama into the music and too often theatrics win out over allowing the music itself to express mood and emotion. Songs are very lengthy without being distinctive and most could have been edited for length. As the album progresses, ER rely more and more on slow-moving (even sluggish) melodic BM with a lot of classical music and operatic padding, and overwrought singing. It probably doesn’t say a great deal that the one track I most looked forward to while listening to the album was the middle ambient piece “Eco Astrale II” – there are three ambient tracks altogether that make up the “Eco Astrale” group – which is an intriguing and mysterious space-ambient drone instrumental, cold, sinister and bewitching in its presentation.
It’s still early days yet for ER and it’s likely that F is still refining the project’s style and aims. He will have his work cut out carving a more individual musical signature for ER on subsequent releases.