Departure

Announcing your arrival and debut release by "departing" is a surefire way of getting attention, at least my attention anyway. Eyelids is an Italian trio playing a very funereal doomy style of raw depressive black metal. The band's style is heavily distorted, all highly corrosive spiky acid guitars that burn huge holes through your head, leaving behind thick blankets of mournfulness and despair. Despite the heavy distortion and the crumbly frying sound, there are distinct melodies and riffs and a heavy beat deep in the music, and the raspy vocal is just audible. Songs are fairly short for such gloomy, sometimes lumbering music - track 1 breaks off abruptly - and deal with isolation and solitude, emptiness and despair.

The production might sound bad but that's due to the seething acid black metal sound - where the Eyelids musicians adopt a clear-toned guitar sound, the music is clear enough and the sound quality is not too bad. The vocals can be buried very deeply to the extent where they merge with the guitars and give a malevolent quality to the music but that's all. The title track has the best rhythms and grooves, and if the song had been longer and had more variety and less repetition, Eyelids could have turned it into a work of deep tragic majesty.

This cassette has a raw unfinished quality: the repetitive songs seem like sketches for longer, more emotionally intense, even stormy pieces. Maybe at some point in the future the band should revisit these tracks and extend them into longer and more developed compositions. The band's sound and style are distinct, and only the vocals need to be much more upfront as they are really fighting to be heard.