Shade of Soul

Among many forgotten black metal releases from the 90's, the only album of Italian trio Brisen, 1996's Shade of Soul, is one of the least celebrated. Formed around 1993, the band has been inactive for most of their existence, allegedly disbanding after the release of this album, reforming during another uncertain timeline, releasing an EP and then... returning to dormancy once more, suggesting possible lack of interest by its members to continue activity. Several other bands on the country did pretty much the same hit-and-run business, and except for drummer Dario Casabona, active with two recent side projects, Griefbringer and Sulphur and Mercury, the other members have no side projects.

Opener Hills of Thunder starts with a mid-tempo groove with fleeting appearances of keyboards/acoustic guitar and ultra-distorted guitar unleashing sixth-minor/tritons along with usual power-chords and some palm-muted choruses. Two minutes in, solo distorted guitar delivers half-jammed arpeggios serving as a break, before the stanzas' riff is repeated until the end. Obvious points of reference are early Burzum (especially its self-titled debut), Darkthrone (especially A Blaze in the Northern Sky) and early Katatonia (due to some esoteric chord voicings and clean guitar arpeggios, as on the coda of Thoughts in the Wind).

The other tracks up until number 7 consists of more sixth-minor distorted chording and still harmonies, citing both from prime Celtic Frost (Earth (Without God with us)). In pure Burzum style, there's relative absence of blast-beats and very few double-bass runs, and the guitar is mostly deprived of pedal effects (save for some chorus on the instrumental intro Sea of Darkness (Brisen Sleep)) and tuned a semitone higher than standard (F standard, like on Hvis lyset tar oss) in all cuts except the whole second side. Nema seems like an "experimental" intro with a prayer in Italian in reverse and abnormal octave-lowered guitar fills (octaver or abrupt detuning?): the true album ends with the dissonant ballad Only the Silence Around Me. The rest of the second side contains four tracks recorded previously in 1994 and 1993, one destined for an unreleased split and the other ones taken from their 1993 demo Holocaust Sky: all of them sound more primitive, tuned to E standard and more punk-based, reminiscent of early Samael's slower material (especially Holocaust Sky).

Production is poor and inconstant: the drumming sounds surprisingly fresh and crisp, as typical of a cleaner AOR production, while the throat-shredding vocals, definitely influenced by mr. Vikernes, are drenched in reverb, but tracks sound empty and incomplete due to the lack of bass: to supplement this, the guitar features flatter equalization with plenty of bass punch, which is quite atypical in black metal. Moreover, the guitar's distorted sound is different from track to track (closer to rock overdrive on the opener and more reminiscent of familiar black metal blazing on Thoughts in the Wind), and on some of them the bass drum is abnormally louder than others (on Tree of Agony it's so loud it goes into saturation). Paradoxically, the earlier demo cuts feature higher fidelity, possibly due to the remastering process.

Hardly a memorable release both as a black metal and an Italian artifact, Shade of Soul sounds more like two EPs coiled as one, with one side clashing directly with the other one. The sound of the first half may appear gripping due to the hypnotic guitar tuning and harmonies, but several errors in production, lack of variation and general lack of concept (not helped by the horrible lyrics, showing poor English command) severely hamper its quality. Instead of being a gem of the past underground movement, this album sounds more like a weird product of its time, worth a spin for historic reasons, but hardly many more.