Инталия

As I have said many, many times, funeral doom is a very hard genre to fuck up, so whenever a band like Intaglio shows up I'm left in shock. The music on offer is pretty generic and by the book for the genre, which certainly isn't an instant death for a band in the genre, where Intaglio manage to somehow fall into the almost not-existent pit of being subpar in funeral doom is in the execution. The sound here is weak and thin, but not in a frail way which can on occasion suit the genre. The volumes and notes are all quite loud and clear, the sound isn't miserable, it's just gutless. This ranges from the light and metallic guitar, to the shrill and reverb-less drums, and to the failed attempt at cavernous vocals. So what happens when a band tries to focus all their energy on being depressive, and then makes something sterile? You get a pretty damn boring 40 minutes of music.

Intaglio don't really do much wrong as such in the way they compose their music, it's slow, it's long, it's certainly not happy, and it's got enough little melodies around to keep it from being a being a total distorted chord laden bore; this is really by the book, but still reasonable stuff. Sadly the band has done everything else wrong. This is not a low budget or sloppy production job, they've just picked a terribly lame guitar tone which doesn't evoke any feelings of misery, or heaviness or anything really, the whole experience is so flat. It's most certainly a deliberate choice, but the decision to go with such choice of such a passionless sound really confounds me. Intaglio is musically very standard funeral doom, seemingly leaning to towards a depressive sound, and lacks either the heaviness or the prettiness to get away with a non-emotive sound which can work on other, more musically exciting albums. The extremely clean sound does work pretty nicely for the soft mellow breaks which pop up hear and there, but again they're not particularly sad, or exciting.

The vocalist here again, isn't bad, he's just a little beneath the average standard of the genres echoing bellowers, the growls on here sound as if they were recorded at a very low volume, and have then been boosted to compete with the rest of the sound. The result of this is mostly all you will be hearing are some gurgles in the throat, with very little real depth to them, and absolutely no power.

Intaglio's self titled album isn't an unbearable listen, but it fails to live up to even the basic standards of quality than the most uninspired bands tend to reach in the genre. It's not obnoxious like a lot of bands which try to throw in various drone and noise touches to the style, so yeah you can listen to this and it won't get on your nerves, but in a world with literally hundreds of competent generic funeral doom bands clogging up the scene there is really no reason to bother with something which fails to even reach mediocrity.