In Eternal Heaven of Silent Whispers

I previously wrote a review that trashed Animae Capronii's And Hourglass of Lifetime - rightfully, because it was essentially shitty folk metal with keyboards instead of guitars. But I'm absolutely astonished to say that In Eternal Heaven of Silent Whispers is a massive improvement in every way. Well, relatively, at least, because this is mostly unremarkable bedroom black metal, but oh my god I'm so extremely happy that this isn't a continuation of the crappy style on the last album I heard.

Unlike the 2008 album I heard, I can safely call this black metal. The riffs actually sound rather dark and misanthropic like black metal should, there are a lot more blast beats scattered around, and there's no singing to be found at all. Most importantly, though, the keyboards are practically all gone, relegated to about two places in the album instead of bleeding over every single section. Until you've heard And Hourglass of Lifetime, you really can't understand exactly how thankful I am that the keyboards are mostly purged for the performance here. To get a semi-accurate picture, just punch yourself in the balls a couple times and that can represent And Hourglass of Lifetime; when the ache fades to the point where you regain the ability to walk, you can imagine that moment as this album.

As a whole, the music is still pretty mid-paced - maybe a little bit faster overall than the last album I heard, but this sure ain't no 1349. The "gothic" influences are a lot more scarce, and the guitars tend to take the keyboards' place when it comes to actually playing these sorts of cheesy melodies. The drum machine is still composed of rather bad samples, but it's also a lot less single-minded this time around, with the beats feeling a lot more fine-tuned to the needs of the individual songs. And lo and behold, Cesare seems to have picked up on his own what I suggested to him only a week ago: there are quite a few swinging rhythms here instead of the constant 4/4 rock beats present on And Hourglass of Lifetime. In addition, the blast beats are actually quite fun when they're used. The final originally composed song on the album, "On This Throne I'll Cry", basically thrives off of them, and while it suffers from the problems the album faces as a whole, I'll be damned if it isn't catchy as hell and fun to listen to for that reason alone. The vocals aren't bad, either: like I've said before, the singing has been eradicated, which is splendid, but the cawing crow-imitating rasps have improved as well. They feel less lazy and more forceful, being able to muster up a convincing emotional display every now and then. They could still use a little work in exactly how consistent this forcefulness is, and being pushed a bit further back in the mix wouldn't hurt them either, but it's still an improvement when compared to And Hourglass of Lifetime (but most things would be, including AIDS).

The guitars are bumped up a lot higher in the mix, compensating for the major lack of keyboards on the album by being about as loud as one would expect the guitars to be on a bedroom black metal album. I guess the biggest problem here would be that the riffs really aren't very original at all - I can't really point you to specific names, but these riffs are all Black Metal Riffs™, in that they're pretty much the archetypes of the genre but don't really have any unique identities as a result. In addition, there are several rather annoying quasi-melodic leads up on the higher strings during some songs, and I easily could do without them. Overall, I personally think In Eternal Heaven of Silent Whispers would be best if its guitar tone were thicker (there aren't really many tremolo riffs here, so this is very rhythmic black metal - a bit more concussive force behind the instruments would hurt it there) and the general performance was played a few steps down, to give the music a darker, more mystic atmosphere.

I'm honestly surprised that this isn't an abomination like And Hourglass of Lifetime, but at the same time it's still not very good and you could still probably find something better with a click of the "random band" button over there on the left.