Foresta Dell'Ombra

This band sells itself (in the press-release found in their website) as the creators of a innovative kind of metal, which is influenced by southern music and folklore. Lyrically it deals with "brazilian epic histories" and makes it in the musical language of this land. It is also said that one can hear influences from black, death, thrash and progressive metal besides the southern folkloric music already mentioned.

The band's kind of bizarre proposal sounds interesting and after hearing that they are also influenced by Astor Piazolla, Hector Villa-lobos and general southern classical music I went to check out their music... and I ended up REALLY dissappointed!

The music is very well produced, the musicians are skillful, the demo art looks good, so why the hell did I get dissappointed? Because I was waiting for something new and what one can hear in this demo is a very generic and uninspired "symphonic black metal" ala Dimmu Borgir.

The song The River's Farm (I wonder what the lyrics of this song say), for exemple, is a very generic metal song, there's not even a shadow of any "southern music" influence or any other influence at all in it which doesn't come from Dimmu Borgir or other similar symphonic metal band! The chorus is very melodic while the rest of the song is just melodic. The keyboard along the whole track sounds so much like Dimmu Borgir, the first KoCovenant or anything else, that it sounds like a Deja Vu and not to something you're listening for the first time.

The vocals didn't please me, they sound like Abbath with cancer in his throat trying to sing, which reminds me of Donald Duck's voice, but maybe I have heard this kind of vocal in some other melodic/symphonic black metal before? everything sounds so familiar that I feel I heard it all before...

But there are, it's true, some "folk" parts in Austhral music. The openning riff of the song Foresta Dell'Ombra is an exemple. The guitars play a polka-like riff while there's a melody played in the keyboard which sounds so much like Finntroll or Trollfest stuff that I feel quite embarrased. What the hell is southern folk music for these guys? I never knew polka was a south american folkloric genre of music.

To finish it briefly: This a completly pointless release. Since Black metal became a popular genre of metal music and bands like Dimmu Borgir reached commercial success so many clones and rip-offs have been poping up from everywhere and this band Austhral is just another of these. I just don't know why the hell they say a thing about their music which is completly false! Who do they want to fool with this press-release information? This is crazy... Black metal has reached such degree of popularity that people don't know what to do to get attention for their black metal bands anymore and it seems that the strategy Austhral used was to write the info of their press-release only to describe the music of a completly different band.

It's because of bands like this that I have to agree with Kanwulf when he says: f### off nowadays Black Metal.