Requiem for a Friend

And here we are, finally, at Animae Capronii's most recent album, Requiem for a Friend. To sum it up, the band hasn't really made any magical improvements that would suddenly make them the greatest thing ever, and you can all go on with your lives without having ever heard this. Hell, compared to Please Forgive Me Oh Lord, I'd even say that this is a step down in quality.

The reason for that is pretty simple, methinks - this sounds a lot like And Hourglass of Lifetime (which was absolutely godawful, if you really need a reminder) without that album's semi-folky influence. Almost all of the riffs and beats which could be called predominantly black metal have been stripped away, which leaves a bunch of basic rocking drum patterns and cheesy melodies which are driven by keyboard synths. The electric guitar's presence has been weakened again, having been pushed to the very back of the mix so that the silly keyboard riffs and the whining, high-pitched, almost amelodic lead guitar tracks get their time to shine. There's also a bit more bass present here (it's probably synthesized, but I can't say for sure), but instead of letting it serve as a source of background melody like most sensible bands do, Animae Capronii has let the electric guitar take that role, and kicked the bass to the very front of the mix and let it take over the main melodies, the reasoning behind which I can't possibly comprehend.

The swinging beats are all gone, replaced with flat, unvaried 4/4 time signatures that get really tedious after forty minutes. The drum beats seem to be trying to mix things up, at least, with admittedly varied kick/snare patterns, but at the same time the music maintains this general "retard army marching to war" pace that makes the attempts at technicality from the drum machine feel like Tomas Haake outtakes that landed through a mystical space-time portal into the middle of a bedroom black metal album. The vocals still range from boring to moderately annoying, being either Animae Capronii's signature cawing rasps or Cesare's heavily accented singing (and yeah, he's improving at it, I guess, but he really needs to stop singing in English because his accent is hard to take seriously).

It feels like the music is literally devolving at this point. It's like the critical point in Flowers for Algernon where Charlie Gordon's mental capabilities start to degenerate, except where in his case he peaked at genius level, Animae Capronii reached an IQ of about 70 before (as this release seems to indicate) the band began to lose its abilities and decline into total stupidity again. This is basically And Hourglass of Lifetime revisited with Animae Capronii's current musical style in mind, but that album wasn't very good to begin with, and it shows - overall, this needs less devotion to the same basic tempo and time signature, better riffs, and more guitar presence in the mix. Personal bias and shit, yeah, but bringing back all the black metal elements (predominantly guitar-driven music and blast beats) wouldn't hurt either. I will note that this is the first time the "gothic" elements, like the first two minutes of "Lament of the Oppressed People", have actually sounded kind of gothic (i.e. closer to The Sisters of Mercy than Nightwish), and they're executed pretty well. But aside from that, every musical element here is just the same as it was on the last album (which is to say, mediocre), if not worse. Don't listen to this album and please try to forget that you ever had anything to do with it, including reading this review.