Promo 2005

“Promo” is the first Lifelover recording out of six. Originally released in 2005 as a demo in few copies on tape, it was then re-issued on CD coupled with some re-releases of Lifelover’s third full-length, “Konkurs”.

I will just start by saying that as much as I love Lifelover, which is to me by far one of the best bands in the last decades, this “Promo” is absolutely unhearable, uninspired and ridiculously boring. Nothing of the future Lifelover is present here: no catchy guitar melodies, no piano tunes, no drum machines, almost no voice at all - only more than 50 minutes of something that could be probably called "ambient", but so repetitive and minimal that it is not believable that this is the same Lifelover which released true masterpieces between 2006 and 2011.

Actually, also for what concerns the line-up this is "another" Lifelover: on this "Promo" in fact we have only B and ( ) playing everything. The demo itself is composed by two songs lasting about 25 minutes each, unoriginally called I and II, pretty similar in the structure: extremely repetitive, slow and dark ambient effects with some occasional "different", faster and "higher" melodies and guitar pieces, such as after some minutes in II, which unfortunately stops after a while only to plunge another time into that senseless weird and eerie effects in the background.

II also presents, after some 17 minutes of pure boredom, ( )'s vocals, in the form of some sick screams which actually are, another time, pretty different from anything he will record on the "true" Lifelover tracks; anyways, even these screams end too early, and then we are supposed to hear another eight minutes of two slow notes repeated over and over. Actually, also I features some shrieks, but lower and even more immersed into the usual boring background music that they do not even sound as real human vocals. Towards the end of the song we have fortunately some "different" electric guitar melodies, but they - another time - add little or nothing to the absolute boredom of the whole track.

In the end, this is something completely different from the rest of the Lifelover discography, which is extremely varied and brilliant, presenting different vocal styles and brilliant guitar and piano melodies; moreover this is no metal at all, and if this could be defined as "ambient" music, it is surely a pretty boring and uninspired kind of ambient. It's actually hard to write about Lifelover's "Promo", since it seems that they are repeating those two or three ambient effects over and over again for an insanely long amount of time; there is no melody, no innovation, no lyrics, no emotionality at all - only cold, minimal, boring music. To love this album, or even to manage to listen entirely to it, you should probably be a die-hard fan of dark, ambient and terribly repetitive music; if you are a Lifelover fan like me, you will not find anything of their trademark sound on here. Fortunately, their "ambient" experiments have come and gone in 2005.