vote
8.0
- Band:
Changeling - Duration: 01: 00: 016
- Available from: 25/04/2025
- Label:
-
Season of Mist
Streaming not yet available
Tom Geldschläger, better known as Fountainhead, is an artist who, albeit relatively young, can already be considered an important figure in the recent history of Death Metal, not only as a musician but also as a producer, composer and sound engineer. Known for its peculiar use of the Fatless guitar, the German artist has played, as a fixed presence or as a guest, with groups such as Defeated Sanity, Belphegor, Nader Sadek, and contributed to the creation of an album of the value of the “Akróasis” value of the Obscura with the fifteen minutes suite “Weltseele”, of which the second part is expected with impatient.
After a 2019 dated output with the name of his alter-ego, Fountainhaeded precisely, dedicated to exploring the less metal side of his music, Tom returns with this new project and the intention of doing things big is clear since the announcement: for the homonymous debut of Changing, in fact, Morean (voice, alkaloid, dark fortress) have been involved, Arran McSportran (low Fatless, Virvum, Vipassi) and Mike Heller (drums, Fear Factory) for the basic formation, but also about fifty guest between classic musicians and metal veterans in its different branches, such as Andy Laroque (ex Death, King Diamond), Yatziv Caspi (ex Orphaned Land) and Ally Storch (Subway to S'sly), just to name a few.
The starting point is, of course, a progressive technical and ferocious death metal, full of riffs and solos, with continuous references to fusion, incursions in jazz, orchestrations and some World Music digression, which finds its peak in songs such as “Instant Results”, “World? What World? And” Falling in Circles “, in which the passage is more than evident in the best. Obscura.
The difference, however, make it the pieces that dare to venture into unexplored paths, such as “Abyss”, eight unpredictable minutes, between chilling doom slowdowns, moments of unexpected melody and narrative voices from deep darkness, or “abdication”, which starts as an innocent fairy tale, evolves into a twisted prog and finally explodes furiously in all its majesty. And the suite? He arrives, right at the end, with “Anathema”: a quarter of an hour abundant in duration, epic and solemn, with changes of rhythm and atmosphere, vocal variety, bass Fertless; Different from how we would have expected it and perhaps this impossibility of comparing it to the past makes it superior to expectations.
“Changing” is a long disc, full of details and stratifications but, all in all, not difficult to deal with, by virtue of a smoothness that facilitates its use and a crystalline production that represents its added value, since it allows you to enhance every single sound without penalizing the whole. Putting this multitude of instrumentalists and singers together must not have been simple, but the use of each of them is functional to the success and, in particular, allows you to complete Morean's good work with choirs and vocal interventions that would not have been in its ropes.
The doubt, legitimate in the face of an deployment of similar forces, is that the result does not correspond to the enormous expectations and that a presentation in great pomp the absence of a real substance: only the time necessary to digest such a long and complex work is able to give a definitive response but, without shouting at yet another miracle, the strongly positive judgment after various listening is justified.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
