SORROW SPHERE – The Wizard Of Doom

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5.5

• Bands:
  SORROW SPHERE
• Duration: 00:31:05
• Available from: 12/06/2026
• Label:

• Club Inferno

In the two years between the release of their debut full-length “Demonotheism” and the present here “The Wizard Of Doom”, the Calabrian epic doomsters Sorrow Sphere went through an authentic revolution, first of all in the line-up: of the one that recorded the aforementioned first work, only the mastermind Ernesto 'Doomlord' Menga (vocals and bass) remained, with Giuseppe 'Buzz' Nicolò from Memories Of A Lost Soul (guitars, drum programming and backing vocals) to complete the lineup.
Even on a musical level there have been some changes compared to the recent past: the good Ernesto's intent was in fact to reappropriate the profoundly and classically doom suggestions that animated the project during its first years of activity, at the end of the nineties, while updating them to the current era; a desire that clearly emerges from listening to the seven tracks (five pieces plus an intro and an extended version) that make up this “The Wizard Of Doom”, an EP lasting about half an hour which, for our band, could represent an authentic new starting point.

Right from the instrumental “The Awakening Of Chaos”, placed at the beginning, we can appreciate how Sorrow Sphere's epic doom recipe has been enriched with orchestral passages and electronic sounds decidedly in line with the most modern derivations of the genre, although deeply innervated on a gothic/doom fabric with rather classical roots (ranging from the English tradition of the Paradise Lost school and My Dying Bride to the more melodic and diaphanous derivations of the Scandinavian school of the early The Gathering and The 3rd And The Mortal, without forgetting a robust splash of classic epic doom metal a la Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus).
The use of the double voice is very particular – one more stentorian and hieratic and the other more theatrical and moody, if not openly melodramatic, both in clean register -, not far from what was experimented by the epic/black meteors Fiurach on the interesting first (and only) work “Chaospawner” from 1999; approach that marks the enveloping “Ashes Of A Dying Breed”, however immediately showing a possible limit of this vocal approach: the sound spectrum occupied by the voices is, in fact, so broad as to almost push the instrumental component into the background, which tends to blend into the background as a mere accompaniment, except to make its intrinsic quality heard in the moments in which they are silent, leaving the entire proscenium to it.

Things become decidedly more incisive in the episodes in which the riffing becomes more full-bodied and decisive, as in the massive “The Wizard Of Doom” and “The Bringer Of Blades” (thanks to some very interesting bass work), while less convincing are the situations in which the more modernist component of our sound takes over too much, as happens in “Doomed Skyes” (a composition in which even the darker and less 'dancing', here and there, for a piece burdened, moreover, by an unconvincing vocal interpretation).
The inclusion of two versions of the good “Descent To Oblivion” is decidedly superfluous, of which the extended version would have been more than sufficient, lasting just a minute and briefly longer than the 'edit' version.
The general impression is that Sorrow Sphere have the ideas and skills to produce interesting music, but that at the moment they are still in a transition and adjustment phase which does not always allow them to hit the desired target. A less 'neutral' choice of sounds and a more decisive valorisation of mere riffing could benefit the general incisiveness of a proposal which, at the moment, is only occasionally convincing, although not without good intuitions and points of interest.