DEWFALL – Landhaskur

vote
8.0

• Bands:
  DEWFALL
• Duration: 00:4759
• Available from: 11/29/2024
• Label:

• Naturmacht Productions

Third album for Dewfall, a band perhaps not prolific, given the measured pace in the production of albums (the third in about twenty years of activity, and fifteen since the debut), but which knows how to balance the space between one album and the other, bringing fine workmanship every time.
The Apulians return with a mature album (not that the previous, excellent, “Hermeticus” wasn't mature) and meticulously attentive to detail, aggressive, violent, but also extremely melodic; epic and majestic but also rough and firmly rooted in the expressiveness that a black-death metal album must have.
“Landhaskur” is a work that grows a lot with listening: at the beginning it can be deceiving and appear 'just' a great extreme metal album, but then it increases its intensity, makes its way into the listener, comes back to mind now in the form of one of the many guitar riffs, now of a vocal line (both the scream is very good but also some lyrical moments by Vittorio Bilanzuolo). In general we are faced with a handful of songs in which the (pagan) death and black matrix is ​​stirred up by a purely heavy metal musicality, properly inherent in the project (which was born as a heavy band from the Maidenianmoreover, with only the guitarist and composer Flavio Paterno at the helm since the foundation), capable of bringing to mind sometimes the most epic Bathory, other times names such as Dissection or even some European black metal acts of the last ten years .
The result is about fifty minutes, slim but not light, which do not hide a very sanguine and Mediterranean drama, exuding passion and genuineness, and at the same time capable of making one perceive how every detail and every sound has been studied and conceived with experience, knowledge of cause and talent.
For once, the conceptual aspect is as important and interesting as the musical one and smacks of study and not quick readings on Wikipedia, with a thematic concept dedicated to the Middle Ages, the Lombards and the pagan cults attributable to them, complete with insertions into Latin and even Lombard, and instruments such as viola and violin or war horn (and tell us if a song like “Laur” doesn't really make you think of a martial, belligerent march in the face of the enemy).
It works, and these peculiarities do not appear to be forced and added frills to give a tone, but rather, an amalgam is created that makes the path of “Landhaskur” effective and with notable peaks (as in “Lackeskur”, with lyrical vocalizations, melody, slowdowns and restarts and what seems to us to be a worry-free fit – here too without being out of place in an epic black metal context).
In short, Dewfall may make a record every five years, but the time they decide to take apparently serves to focus and work with dedication on their music, which comes out as compelling not without a touch of ancestral hieraticity in the elaboration of the themes chosen. Definitely recommended listening.