Toward the Castle

Increasingly there are black metal projects that, though faithful to the BM ethos and composing and playing songs or extended works with BM structural elements, nevertheless eschew guitars and drums, long considered the essential instruments for playing BM or indeed metal of any genre. One such act is Italy's Fear of Eternity whose sole member plays all instruments, all of them keyboards. "Toward the Castle" was the project's debut album released in 2005.

The atmosphere on the album is certainly very cold and airy in a dry sort of way, as though all the action here took place at night after snowfall has ceased and the winter night sky is clear with stars in the far distance twinkling away. The scenery is silent and serene, and everything is lit up by the stars and the moon, no matter whether it's a full moon night or not. Keyboards dominate in every track and what BM guitars (real or otherwise) may exist appear as back-up instruments only, thin and spidery in sound and texture. Percussion (as I guessed) is synthetic and determines the pace of the music for good and ill. The overall sound generally is clean but is thin.

The songs are not too bad but neither are they good: even though each track has plenty of melodies and riffing, somehow it all seems very tired and lacking in energy and emotion. A big part of the problem is the heavy reliance on synthetic percussion and rhythms: these aren't varied at all yet they drag the music along at the same pace all the way through each song and so sole band member Andrea Tilenni hardly has any time to develop any mood or feeling that may be inherent in the music. The songs end up very mechanical in the way they unfold. Even the sounds of the instruments sound one-dimensional and mechanical; Tilenni seems to have relied almost exclusively on synths and electronic keyboards to replicate the sounds of piano, harpsichord, organ, whatever, even though he could have dragged in a real piano or an organ (like a Hammond organ) into his studio if he wanted the tones of such instruments to grace his recordings. No matter how original melodies are or creative Tilenni tries to be, everything ends up sounding as if it has all been heard before on other people's recordings and done better as well.

As the album progresses, the limitations of relying almost exclusively on synth-based instrumentation become all too obvious: Tilenni is forced to rely on sound effects that might have been ripped off old TV shows or Hollywood movies and synthesised orchestral wash is brought in to provide drama and heighten whatever emotional intensity might have appeared in the current track or previous tracks. The album ends up perilously skirting a thin line between forced melodrama and kitsch. Whatever genuine coldness first existed disappears because everything now sounds very artificial and trite.

The crackling vocals are not bad and might be said to be the best aspect of FoE's style. However even these are quite limited - they are mostly spoken and convey little feeling so listeners are hard put to tell whether the vocalist feels any sadness or relief at passing from one realm of existence to another.

Unfortunately it's records like "Toward the Castle" that give non-guitar BM a black (erm) name. I would have thought that one idea behind removing guitars from their dominant role in black metal and substituting other instruments was to demonstrate that the spirit of black metal and its essential elements and themes could exist independently of particular instruments, not totally relying on guitars for their existence, and thus open the music and the worldview it espouses to other people who through no fault of their own don't have access to or are able to play electric guitars but do have access to other instruments and might want to play BM regardless. The result could have been very highly creative and original music that lifts BM far beyond its metal pinnings and makes it truly a genre independent of heavy metal. Here though, the substitution of synthesiser and electronic keyboards for guitars has resulted in an album of rather stale and unoriginal faux Gothic music.