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7.0
- Bands:
BOLESKINE HOUSE - Duration: 00:40:58
- Available from: 05/17/2024
- Label:
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Masked Dead Records
Streaming not yet available
In Boleskine House's debut album the 'blues' evoked by the title is there and not there, depending on your point of view.
In terms of musical references, it seems absent: in these forty minutes of black – doom inflected towards alternative (or alternative metal encrusted with black and extended with doom extensions), there is practically no trace of blues.
If, however, by 'blues' we mean that slightly absent melancholy, that pain of living almost reminiscent of Montalian, then there is an ocean of it. “Miserabilist Blues” is, in fact, a deeply sentimental album, in which even anger seems delicately wrapped in a cloth of nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time that was, or perhaps for a time never lived; but also nostalgia for listening that for many will hark back to late adolescence or Sensucht of the twenty years lived in the early 2000s, when Katatonia and Paradise Lost, new wave, but also the already established names of the Norwegian black scene more inclined towards melody were playing in the CD player.
Boleskine House's bittersweet elegy develops some stylistic features of blackened death and atmospheric black within the axes of doom expansion and the emotional suggestions of alternative metal. The result is an interesting album, with very recognizable influences but with an unusual flavor in its own way and difficult to trace with certainty to something known.
Like all 'new' flavours, “Miserabilist Blues” may not convince at first bite – also because the language of the Milanese duo is not the most immediate; but with a little patience, listen after listen, you can see the richness of the arrangements, the finesse of some compositional solutions and the large quantity of ideas present in each song unfold.
In this sense, “Black House Painter”, the opening track also chosen as the project's calling card, eloquently condenses the dominant characteristics of Boleskine House's proposal. The bouquet of genres described above here takes on a vaguely blackened death connotation, which then veers towards reminiscences of Paradise Lost and later, towards the middle of the song's notable duration, opens up to a wide interlocution between the guitars, this time clean and almost romantic. Just when the piece seems to be moving towards its conclusion, it suddenly returns to more aggressive lashes which then slope down, like a wave stretching out on the shoreline, towards an elaborate instrumental train.
Here we appreciate the refined compositional stratification that will characterize the entire album: guitars, sustained bass and articulated drumming weave a sumptuous sound carpet on which the music of Boleskine House unfurls even in its crudest expressions. At the same time, we notice on this piece the occasional prolixity of a well-defined project, but perhaps not yet totally in focus.
“Need” moves roughly in the same territory as the previous song, accentuating its epic component and references to the Swedish school (Katatonia, Opeth); while “A Place To Mourn Forever” plays on chiaroscuro, alternating sections of heavily contaminated black with perhaps the most melodic and airy episodes of the entire album. The closing is entrusted to a curious cover of “When You Sleep”, hit by the dream pop pioneers My Bloody Valentine. The original song emerges, let's not say distorted, but at least extensively processed through the filter of Boleskine House, which relaxes everything and sinks everything. Like the rest of the album, it is an interesting experiment, whose satisfaction is inevitably very subjective, but whose quality appears difficult to dispute.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM