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vote
7.0
- Bands:
FLAMEKEEPER - Duration: 00:30:33
- Available from: 10/05/2024
- Label:
-
Invictus Productions
Streaming not yet available
Often the biographical notes that accompany the albums we review end up providing just the space-time coordinates within which to place each release. Sometimes, however, there are stories that make even the songs we listen to much more understandable, as in the case of Flamekeeper: this project was born as a one-man band by Marco S. Vermiglio, a Roman musician with a long militancy as frontman of Demonomancy.
Marco, having abandoned black metal in favor of a musical project that could bring light and not darkness, completely changed genre, dedicating himself to epic heavy metal with a traditional edge, the son of bands like Manilla Road, Manowar, with an impetus impetuous that also reminded us of Bathory from the “Hammerheart” period.
Thus “We Who Light The Fire” was born, an EP that laid the foundations of Flamekeeper's sound and which we reviewed with interest on these pages at the end of 2019. We had to wait four years – with everything we experienced in the meantime – to listen to the first real full-length of our band, which today is starting to look more and more like a real band. Of course, Marco still remains the fulcrum around which the whole project revolves and on the album, in addition to having composed the songs, he sings, plays the guitar, the bass and the keyboards, but now alongside him we also have a drummer, Axel Johansson and a second guitarist, Filipe Jesus Minhava who, as we will see, gives us several points of interest. No longer a solitary project, therefore, but an international nucleus, based in Sweden (where Vermiglio currently lives) and which brings together musicians with very different roots.
All this translates into an eponymous album that continues, and above all expands, the discussion begun with the debut EP: Flamekeeper build a handful of songs for a total duration that barely touches half an hour, in which the essentiality and artistic urgency prevails over pure attention to detail.
Perhaps in “Flamekeeper” you won't find the sharpest riffs, or the most pressing rhythms, and even Marco's voice is certainly not that of a virtuoso, yet everything works very well, perhaps even Thank you to certain imperfections that end up giving personality to the entire work.
It must be said, then, that within this album it is possible to find an excellent melodic vein, capable of making all the songs immediate and effective, such as in the title track, or the excellent “Raise The Banner”. Other notable episodes are “Death, You'll Tremble To Take Me”, where the group's epic streak appears even more focused; “The Roads Of Rome”, melancholy in the lyrics, yet proud and majestic, with the keyboards replicating the sound of the brass instruments; and finally “Stray Yet Still Free”, characterized by an excellent acoustic introduction, played by Minhava on the Portuguese guitar.
“Flamekeeper” therefore confirms the good impressions of the EP and consolidates the potential of Marco, a musician who seems to us to have confidently taken the right path.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM