DVM SPIRO – MMXXVI – Severe

vote
8.0

• Bands:
  DVM SPIRO
• Duration: 01:16:03
• Available from: 01/16/2026
• Label:

• My Kingdom Music

Streaming not yet available

Dvm Spiro were born in Turin in 2012 on the initiative of three members of Nihil Locus, a historic group from the Italian underworld that has returned to light in recent months with the release of “Semper”, the second album in a thirty-five year career.
Massimo Currò (bass), Roberto Ripollino (growl, guitar, ukulele, drums) and Valeria De Benedictis (guitar, clean vocals, keyboards), together with singer/cellist Maurizio Demichelis, arrive at the release of the debut “MMXIX – In Frigidvm Lectvm” in 2019, an almost fifty-minute mastodon of atmospheric and oppressive doom/death metal that he tempers the funeral doom of the beginning with more elaborate and complex solutions.

After having lost track of themselves for almost seven years, the Piedmontese return, this time as a trio without Demichelis and with Ripollino and De Benedictis sharing the task of the vocal department, with an album which, in terms of duration and heaviness, even manages to make its predecessor pale: “MMXXVI – Grave” passes the threshold of an hour and a quarter of duration without a single second that can put the listener at ease.
That of Dvm Spiro is a doom/death metal that draws from the nineties, from the early Anathema, Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride or Celestial Season, reworking the material with a lugubrious taste and a theatrical attitude, in which each song lives on the contrast between a growl that comes from beyond the grave and a seductive clean voice, between riffs of a stunning slowness and sudden silences filled only by a few piano notes: a decidedly difficult, which the three musicians from Turin demonstrate that they know how to tackle with skill and with the experience accumulated in all these years of dedication to the genre. The singing in Italian and a rather raw production make the message even clearer, amplifying the funereal atmospheres and the opposition between moments of calm and blind fury.

“Dvm Spiro” literally means 'while I breathe', taken from the Ciceronian motto “dvm spiro, I hope”that is, “while I breathe, I hope” and the sequence of pieces seems to be a hopeless journey towards the exhalation of the last breath, which begins with “Preludio”, the descent into the darkest depths with passages of funereal quiet and angry explosions, and ends with “Alla Fine”, a 'short' instrumental piece with placid sounds and resigned tones.
In the middle, “Troppo Lente Sscendo Le Tue Lacrime” represents the most heartbreaking episode and the one that comes closest to an idea of ​​melody (as distressing as it may be), but the emotional peak is reached by the twenty minutes of “Indistinta Morte”, the lucid description of the passage to the afterlife with sparse keyboard sounds and the word “die” spelled out as if it were an order.

“MMXXVI – Grave” is not a work for everyone and, above all, it is not music that can be understood without application and repeated listening: a necessary sacrifice to enter a world of pain and desolation from which it will be difficult to escape.