Apneica
Pulsazioni... Conversione

Apneica’s second piece of work looks very exciting, the cover art in intriguing to say the least. Their logo isn’t though but you cannot dismiss how interesting it looks and with a title in Italian it sort of promises even more. The Italian quartet released their self titled debut back in 2011 and are now back with a quartet of songs on a 27-minute EP. It is said to be a brilliantly crafted little gem that both the fragility and passion of humanity and moulds it into a musical/lyrical concept that turns around the meaning of water seen as a human being “journey” scenario. Sometimes press releases are more confusing than good, well that is actually quite often the case since it seems like the bands or people who do not work in marketing and information are writing them. I am glad that I didn’t read this before I started listening to the EP.

Musically it is gothic metal of the little darker kind, there are many bands namedropped in the press release, three of them are mentioned as similar bands. The music is built around a quite massive soundscape where darkness and light meet and form an interesting atmosphere and this dark-light thing continues throughout the vocals that are found in both growly and clear singing form. And the lyrics are performed in Italian, something that could be seen as a fresh perspective but you really need to do more than that to make something that sound fairly typical of the genre to sound fresh. They lack a little bit of originality and even though there are some interesting spins on thing and an ending instrumental track the EP still ends up quite predictable.

The clean singing is pretty good for this music while the growls are not. The growls are the biggest let-down of this EP, the songs are pretty good, the atmosphere is great but the growls sound pretty bad and take much away from the experience of listening to this album. Another little niggle is the lack of originality, which of course is a common thing in music today. Still, I think this is a pretty good EP, if you want to sit down and relax to some music this is a good choice. Fans of the genre will most likely not be disappointed, and I think that few would be if they bought this little EP of 27 minutes, as it is a very solid piece of craftsmanship that just requires a few improvements to be great.

I think they would have been better served by writing a complete album with these songs as a base and two or three more original songs to spice it all up, that would have been something – and if they had changed to a better growler it would have been way up there. In Orbita is my highlight of the album, maybe not the best track but it has some good fresh moves which makes it stand out a little bit in an EP that is otherwise quite high on similitude. In the end though I think that we can conclude that this is an EP that is quite okay and no one would probably be disappointed if buying it but you grow a little tired with it pretty quickly.

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