As Life Drifts Away

A new melodic blackened doom project, Winds of Tragedy may be based in Santiago in Chile but first album "As Life Drifts Away" is very much an international affair with drummer Emidio Alexandre Ramos having recorded his parts in Lisbon (Portugal) and the album produced, mixed and recorded by Filippos Koliopanos in Athens (Greece). All the other work – the singing, the strings and the synths – comes from Chilean multi-instrumentalist Sergio Gonzalez Catalán, hereafter Sergio G, who runs another recent project, the death / doom act Rise To The Sky which to date (July 2022) has released five albums, several singles and two EPs in the space of less than three years since 2019! Clearly there's something in the water over in Santiago that Sergio G is drinking, that he has energy and time left over to devote to another doom fusion project after his original project's output that would reduce most other acts, solo and group acts, to misery, depression and an early grave.

As the album title and individual song titles like "A Place of Despair" and "Our Time is Gone" suggest, this debut is a very melancholy work of longing, grief over losing a loved one, regret over past failure and contemplation of death. The music is strongly based on melodic tremolo riffing from Sergio G backed by Ramos's enthusiastic drumming. Sergio G uses a fairly low and guttural death metal style of singing with a harsh and raspy tone. On most tracks, the core black / doom instrumental set-up is boosted by very mournful high-pitched lead guitar soloing or equally melancholy orchestral keyboards. Intensely sad, even weepy mood dominates across the album, especially on "Everything is Dying" where slow dirge-like moments of drawn-out lead guitar solo alternate with blast-beat death metal style bursts of anguish and pain.

Apart from "Everything is Dying" and a couple of tracks near the end, where there are quiet plaintive moments or brooding meditation along with the slashing guitars and symphonic synthesiser melodies, the music is brisk and busy, with a clear production that allows every sound to be heard. The guitar melodies carry nearly all the emotion, leaving the vocals to groan and growl away in the background. While the short songs are well written and performed, and every moment in them is made to work, at the same time I have a feeling that they are a bit too brisk and efficient, and at least a couple of songs could do with a little bit of loose fat on them in the form of doodling improvised lead guitar or a short drum solo from Ramos. The tracks whiz by, creating an impression of sameness throughout the album if you were to hear it just once or twice as most songs don't have very distinctive melodies and the singing tends to be too even, without any screams or howls of pain at all. Middle tracks like "You And I" and "A Place of Sad Despair" come across as generic pieces filling up the space between the early highlight "Everything is Dying" and the later tracks which feature a bit more variety in the instruments used and in the music with more (if brief) ambient passages.

For a first album in a hybrid style that may be experimental for Sergio G, "As Life Drifts Away" is a technically solid and polished work. It plays like a medium to fast-paced doom metal album with some symphonic black and death metal elements, and if that's the style Sergio G is most comfortable with, all the more strength to him. Some listeners may gripe that there aren't enough black metal elements in this music that would distinguish it from Sergio G's Rise To The Sky project, and that would be a fair criticism: from what I have heard of that project (not much, admittedly), the only major difference between the two projects is that Winds of Tragedy features tremolo guitar riffing. The style of singing either needs to change – Sergio G's vocals really are too serene for blackened doom – or the project could take on a second vocalist. Ramos's energetic drumming could be more upfront in the music for a more powerful and muscular sound.

I'm hopeful that future releases from Winds of Tragedy will see Sergio G experimenting more with his sound, style, song-writing and singing, taking that project musically away from Rise To The Sky and turning it into something more than a blackened side project.