(N)Utopia

Once upon a time, Graveworm didn't suck. While popular consensus has made it a habit of lauding records like Scourge of Malice and When Daylight's Gone as melancholic slabs of second-wave refinement, (N)Utopia tends to get swept under the rug and undeservedly grouped with the rest of the band's positively atrocious post-millennial output. After the well-meaning but critically flawed Engraved in Black, expectations and anticipation surrounding (N)Utopia were meager at best. Despite Graveworm's revisionism into the most tepid of waters with more recent duds like Collateral Defect, (N)Utopia embodies a fluke of sorts, proving that just about any band (no matter how far gone) has the proclivity to deliver the goods if pressured.

To evoke familial parallels, the primary approach of (N)Utopia checks many of the same recondite boxes as post-Higher Art of Rebellion Agathodaimon, featuring similarly pristine production values and the debonair, almost sophisticated atmosphere that comes from it all. Despite coming off as "weekend warrior" of sorts once stacked up against Graveworm's significantly more sincere earlier records, (N)Utopia pulls very few punches and plays to what few strengths remain in the band's arsenal. Despite summoning mental images of a band who wipes their collective corpsepaint off just in time to pick the kids up from school, many a final gasp of brilliance remains for those with the patience and dedication to give (N)Utopia a fair shake. Despite Mair's orchestrations being unfairly scaled back yet again, the riffs finally have a decent grasp on their chunky, Stygian bite this time around. While they still fall in line with the inferior Engraved in Black regarding both style and substance, Righi and especially Flarer finally deliver the goods on tracks like "MCMXCII" and the baleful shot-to-the-arm that is "Never Enough." The latter features a chest-pounding verse structure and Fiori at his most venomous, helping the song vault once-insurmountable genre barriers in what ends up being one of Graveworm's best compositions to date.

While self-parody is never more than a stone's throw away when referring to the genre cross-section Graveworm so ambiguously occupies, (N)Utopia comes off as delightfully somber and ambivalent, immediately distancing itself from stinkers like Engraved in Black and Collateral Defect in dapper appeal alone. Mair is still given so little to work with, though, you can't help but feel the frustration and desperation ooze out of her restrained performances here. While knee-jerk reaction on my part wishes to file Mair's (N)Utopia effort(s) under the "less is more" banner, the sad fact is that much of this material is held back without the melodic element traditionally telegraphed via the synths. The brilliant, keyboard-driven instrumental "Deep Inside" only serves to accentuate the aforementioned deficit, coming off like a demented music box and a gateway to an infernal phantom kingdom.

As mentioned, Fiori even manages to impress more often than he bores this time around. He still utilizes a thrilling disparity between subsonic roars and a more traditional blackened rasp, but the final mixture yields significantly more mileage compared to his featureless output on Engraved in Black. His screaming is loud, exhaled and wet-sounding, helping him slide into a rather frictionless comfort zone that checks off yet another regular liability as it goes above and beyond the call of dæmonic duty.

In the end, (N)Utopia finds itself enviously positioned on my shelf right next to modern Gothic classics like Agathodaimon's Chapter III, and dust shall never settle upon it's brow. While it undoubtedly represents a true watershed moment on Graveworm's part, time has not necessarily been kind to (N)Utopia. As the years go by it's lasting power becomes more and more evident, yet as Graveworm continues to shit out worthless followups like Fragments of Death and Diabolical Figures, one can't help but ponder the benefits of simply avoiding Graveworm altogether.