Welcome to the New World

One of my older email addresses gets a fair amount of spam. Along with the usual offers of Asian Beauties, penis enlargement and Trumpcare benefits, I've recently been receiving an email almost daily concerning 'Letters from Santa'. It's a chance for your children to receive an actual letter from Santa, a Christmas dream come true. Yes, it's an obvious way to collect address and credit card information from gullible idiots, but that's not the point. The point is, who wants a fucking letter from Santa? Tradition states that kids write letters to Santa asking for toys and games. How the hell does this work in reverse? "Meet me at the bottom of your chimney at midnight." Children want presents from Santa's sack, not Santa's sack, or a stupid letter.

I wanted Walk in Darkness to be dark. The cover sleeve for this release, as well as the cover adorning their prior debut offering, tantalizes with the prospect of bleakness, heaviness, and possible occult references from forbidden tomes. When I see hooded dudes, I think of words like "congregation", "procession" and "ritual”. I think of hooded menaces. Shit, outside of the babe singer, the band poses in grim monk cloaks, and even performs live in them. So, was this album female-fronted pulverizing doom? No.

Nicoletta Rosellini can sing, no question. Yet her inflections and quirks reveal a voice more suitable to Lilith Fair folk pop. It’s as if in suppressing her Italian accent, she overcompensated with a bit too much twang and angsty Americana. And it’s easy to hear since she’s so loud in the mix. The rest of the band is essentially a backdrop for her vocal prowess, so they might as well wear cloaks since there’s no reason to a give a shit about any of them. There’s a guest grunter for a couple of songs as well, in which he’s given some vocoder action. A fucking guest growler who can’t even growl without help. Talk about an easy paycheck.

Getting away from the Nicoletta show briefly, the band aren’t actually terrible. For the most part this is gothic symphonic poop-metal, but there are multiple occurrences of unusual time signatures carrying the tunes, not just as a brief wisp of “hey, look at us getting technical! Yay! Now back to 4/4”, but throughout the verses, bridges, and whatnot. I like that, and if the band had any prominence in the mix and if the guitars weren’t so piss-weak sounding, a rhythmically jarring number like “Persephone's Dance” would be pretty cool. There’s potential. For the most part though, these songs don’t match the band’s image at all. The melodies are pop-orientated, and the band are generally at their best when they ditch metal altogether for balladry since Nicoletta is by far the most important member, even though their bass player calls himself Monk Key. He must be a riot.

I wanted presents and I got a letter instead. There was promise in the packaging, and I can admit that at least the band weren’t playing it too safe thanks to some off-kilter time signatures, but other than discovering a fine singer who will probably go solo someday, graced by accommodating music more suited to her style of delivery, I’m going to be a brat and just state that I didn’t want this. The guitars are impotent, adding little weight even during the infrequent “double-bass pedal workout” moments, the melodies aren’t all that memorable, and this whole project should be renamed Nicoletta and the Monks. Kind of a 60’s doo-wop name, but it suits their image better than Walk in Darkness.