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7.0
- Band:
Eternal Darkness - Duration: 00:38:16
- Available from: 07/18/2025
- Label:
-
Pulverized Records
Streaming not yet available
There are records that come too late, when the conditions for being understood or valued really seem shaded. “Eternal Darkness”, the first and last full-length of the Swedish band of the same name, is one of these emblematic cases.
After forming in the early nineties and having left behind only a handful of demo, the Eternal Darkness had quickly disappeared from the scenes in 1995, leaving a musical trajectory in suspense which, although having never had a real impact on the Swedish Death Metal scene, showed interesting ideas. For years the name has remained confined between the folds of the darkest worship, until, thanks to the revisionist drifts of extreme metal and the growing attention to the Scandinavian deathroom Deathroom, someone started talking about it with almost mythological tones. The “Total Darkness” collection, containing all the demo material and some interesting tracks recorded for an album never completed, contributed to feeding this narrative, although it remained evident that the group still had much to be shown to be considered like the key names of the movement.
In 2019, against all expectations, the band then announced its return, arousing a certain ferment between enthusiasts and collectors. The plan to finally record a complete album seemed to be an opportunity to close the circle, to give the form made to those intuitions left in suspense decades earlier. However, in the most classic of the twists and turns, when the disc was now ready to be published and the launch campaign to the starting ribbons, the group communicated a new dissolution, making everything fall into silence again.
So we find ourselves today, with “Eternal Darkness” in the hands, as if it were a sort of late will, the last whisper of a discontinuous and troubled career that has never really found a stable dimension. An epilogue that comes to delayed burst, but which paradoxically confirms how, net of difficulties and long silences, the Eternal Darkness had something to say. The disc, in fact, is not the simple nostalgic legacy of a forgotten band, but the concrete fruit of a coherent vision, well rooted in the old-fashioned Deathroom and capable, today, to return dignity and a minimum of thickness to a name always remained on the margins.
Musically, “Eternal Darkness” is clearly placed within that primigenio death-doom cheerful which in the early nineties took shape between the mists of northern England and the Swedish forests, combining the heaviness of the death metal with the funeral gloomy of the Doom. The most direct reference is undoubtedly to the Paradise Lost of the beginning – “Lost Paradise” and “Gothic” – but there is no shortage of moments in which the sound becomes more biting and telluric, recalling the martiality of the Bolt Thrower or the visceral and alarm approach of other so -called worship groups such as Modark, Repipikoulu and Gorement. Being a work that arrives with extreme delay on the original plans – within a panorama that, in the meantime, in all these decades, has seen everything and the opposite of everything – someone could see it as a mere exercise of style, however there seems to be a basic belief, an expressive tension that makes the disc credible even in its lingering on sound formulas now out of time.
The songs, eight in all for a total duration of less than forty minutes, show an essential but never too flat writing. The quintet alternates powerful passages, dominated by monolithic riffs and cadenced battery, with more discharged and introspective moments, in which the melodies emerge discreetly, leaving room for a sense of ruin and resignation that permeates the entire work.
It is a disc that, also because of the rough production, sounds frank and old school, trying to resume and expand what was proposed on those first demos now over thirty years ago. Not all episodes are very inspired, but certain songs actually have an interesting development and show a nice melodic taste, clearly modeled on what can be listened to on the first works of the Lost paradise, but sometimes even close to the more melodic passages of works of classic Swedish Death metal such as Dysmember or Interior, filtered through a slowed and aged lens, as if the time passed. very much to conceive music.
They stand out in particular songs such as “Grief”, “When life ends” or “Death Above All” (the latter from the final full of solo interventions), in which the influences doom and Death merge naturally, creating a plumbea atmosphere that lasts even after the end of listening. But it is the whole that convinces: “Eternal Darkness” is a cohesive, well -interpreted album, who manages to condense a defined identity despite the restricted sphere in which he chooses to move.
In the end, a sense of melancholy completeness remains: if it is true that the Eternal Darkness will never enter the ranks of the decisive formations for the Scandinavian scene, it is equally true that this posthumous album gives them a late dignity, a voice finally put on a tape clearly. In a vein in which the memory sometimes counts how much the actual talent, “Eternal Darkness” is affirmed as a small, definitive act of resistance against oblivion.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
