vote
6.0
- Band:
Crypts of Despair - Duration: 00:34:38
- Available from: 04/18/2025
- Label:
-
Transcending Obscure
Streaming not yet available
After four years of waiting from the previous “All Light Swallowed”, the Lithuanians Crypts of Despair return with their new album “We Belong In The Grave”, a work that marks a rather evident change of direction in their sound. The time spent between the two outputs seems to have engraved a lot on the group's stylistic address, which reappears with a much more compact sound, Groovy and direct than the elusive sounds, between Death Metal and dissonant atmosphere, traceable in the last test. The quintet took that style and stripped it of various tinsels, making the structures more essential, thickening the rhythms and trying to give the proposal a more round and immediate cut. The process had an influence above all at the guitar work, with the most arzigolated riffs who have given way to very basic themes, robust in the sound, often looking for a strong groove, with the double battery case to often support the most syncopated plots to make them further powerful. The whole gains it in cohesion and impact, but, at the same time, loses part of the variety and unpredictability that characterized the previous style.
Also thanks to a vocal register if necessary more guttural, in some situations you do not get far from Deathcore solutions, even if these almost always are appropriately inserted within compositions in which they also have the opportunity to impose other types of ideas.
Certainly, from an exquisitely rhythmic point of view, the band appears a little regressed, with the guitar work that today does more as a basis, performing a filling function, instead of giving compelling riffs and getting to the driving force.
The melodies, on the other hand, remain one of the strengths of the training: here there is once again a good research and definition work. Sometimes the arias are so lightning and strangers that they even remember Akhlys. In this sense, songs such as the title-track “We Belong In the Grave” or “Terminal Dias” manage to combine power and sound research convincingly, evoking a left and hypnotic aura. Other episodes, on the contrary, end up highlighting the new 'ignorant' setting of rhythms too much,, leading to slowdowns as obsessive as dishes, as it often happens in Deathcore environments. In short, this simplification leads to a partial dynamic flattening, with some songs that actually struggle to keep the tension high, laying on very linear and redundant themes.
Even a defined but substantially aseptic production does not help in supporting the disc, which, on balance, ends up giving the idea of being an interlocutory passage, with certain modernist ambitions poorly supported by a songwriting that in some cases proves a little bitter. Certainly “All Light Swallowed” was from another level, as regards vision and realization.
With “We Belong In The Grave”, the Crypts of Despair therefore go into all in all dangerous territories, partially denying a formula that, if adequately developed, could have given further satisfaction, to approach instead a sound and a type of audience that perhaps do not yet belong to him.
It remains to be seen if this new setting will be refined in the next works or if it will represent only a transitory phase in their evolution, a first step that could lead to more mature developments in the future.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
