Riti Occulti
s/t

Some occult rites from the land that looks like a shoe, can that be something to behold? Well, the cover looks very boring, doomy and black with a pentacle and such – not really the most impressive thing I have seen in my life. They say that the band traverse genres and play something of a Black Sabbath styled doom metal crossed with the hazy black metal of today, to me that doesn’t sound too exciting and I would not really say that it would even be a good idea to cross two genres that are mainly without tempo. But if they want to try it, who am I to argue? And they do use two female vocalists, one for clean vocals and the other one for the raspy ones. So how does it all fit together?

Well, it is doomy black metal where the tempo is low and the focus seems to be more on the atmosphere than on the hit potential but with a limited edition of 300 albums I guess the hit potential isn’t anything they are counting on. The production is a bit murky, I think the soundscape has that cheap basement sound that many so-called atmospheric black metal bands have. It sounds cheap – very cheap. The female vocals are either poor as hell (the raspy ones) or just drowns in the overall soundscape (the clean vocals).

The playing time is long, just short of fifty minutes over seven tracks and the variation is not much and the entire album falls fairly short of acceptable to me. The soundscape lacks finesse and there are some fairly odd and not very good synth things going on, and the vocals are not exactly terrific so not much on this album brings out my smiley face. There are some upsides like some fascinating ideas but most of it falls rather flat to the ground like the clean vocals which are quite forgettable – if I am kind. When listening to the album I didn’t even notice that there were clean female vocals, you have to listen really closely to find anything of value on this album.

So, I am quite mean to these guys and perhaps even without humour but the thing is that we hear so much music like this. Music that was a poor idea already at the idea stage and the thing I wonder is why rerelease an album that was pointless to begin with as this album was released in 2012 in an as limited edition as this one and they do have a second album released in 2013. I think that if the first edition of this album sold out they should be eternally grateful because I seriously doubt that a very high percentage of the buyer were happy with their purchase.

I think that the targeted audience for this kind of album is smaller than the number they have printed and I think that no one who reads our webzine should even bother with this stuff as it was a bad idea on the idea stage and it still is a bad idea when it is tried. I think this album really deserves to be better just forgotten, I have already thrown it away as far as I can throw.

HHHHHHH