vote
7.5
- Band:
MASS - Duration: 00:43:20
- Available from: 11/04/2025
- Label:
-
Metal Blade Records
Streaming not yet available
The mass, three years after the lucky and celebrated “Close”. If the first two egg whites, “Belfry” and “Feast for Water”, had already made the group name spin, reporting it as one of the best examples of Plumbeo and dark metal adorned with a female voice, with little obvious influences, a compositional inspiration of superior caliber and a far away from easy stereotypes, “Close” went further. Perhaps an unrepeatable job, with the influences of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern sounds to perfectly fit into the Doom and Hard Rock soul of the Venetian boys, capable in that case to darken everything about an even more marked experimental adole than in the first two albums. A disk of sparkling creativity, excellent both in the most direct and urgent songs, and in those with the most hermetic scares, played on many different influences and with an amalgam of the various parts of the very fine caliber.
As anticipated in the track-by-track, with “The Spin” the quartet moves away a lot from the sound canons of its third album, incorporating suggestions of the Dark/Gothic Rock daughters of the 80s. An idea that, briefly, could suggest an approach to all that metal current – in a female voice or not in the foreground – influenced by The Sisters of Mercy, Killing Joke, Siouxsie and the Banshees who has taken a nice slice of the market in recent years. The answer is not so obvious and surely the group did not want to slip into a vein already created by others because, even if that type of influence is perceptible, the final result is nothing taken for granted, or frivolous, without thick.
The 2025 mass remained a multifaceted creature and not so simple to frame, travel within many worlds, going to the heart and not limiting themselves to a superficial knowledge of them; This desire to explore, combine and mix according to one's tastes and canons also leads to considerable results, offering us a tracklist with ambivalent contents.
If on the one hand the group offers its most impetuous and metallic material to large sections, on the other the sense of enchantment, laying it in theonical and comfortably stopping and dilating the times, it is something that the group can do with great naturalness. While guitarism and even more the rhythmic section are spent in rhythmics with an Ottantian taste – particularly evident, for example, in the first minutes of “At Races” – Sara's multifaceted vocality has the power to bring us elsewhere, to make us lose in a dimension of volatile and impalpable shapes. The mild dicpezza of which his voice is imbued remains the pivot of the mass-life, which translates into some very direct and sliding songs (“Fire in the Roof”, “Reveal”), as in more articulated compositions, changing in the atmospheres, intensity and ardor.
The jazzate feeling that the four had shone from the debut offers some of the most successful moments, truly special precisely because in them the band's personal imprint is particularly incisive: we are talking about the softly piano start of “immolation” and the intermediate trumpet in the second single “The Dress”, where that instrument interprets a more energetic trend and, while scoring a large detachment with a moment, At all and indeed goes to increase the thickness of the song.
“The Spin” therefore confirms the talent of the Mass, however, it does not repeat the exceptional levels of “Close”. If something amazing was practically everywhere in that album, it was kidnapped and bewitched by an electrifying compositional flair, his successor gives excellent vibrations, but it appears decidedly more 'normal'. Personally, we find some dilated and mild situations not so compelling, so that on some occasions, we think of the “VOID Meridian” opes, or the second half of “At Races”, they go to dilute the previous metal action excessively, removing a little pathos: delicacy and intimism remain important figures to define the group and it is not that the mass have lost the way when they sound more. rarefied; Only, the emotionality of these moments is not always as perceived as one would expect.
While the most dark and Gothic halo is evoked with good efficacy, and perhaps we would have liked a greater dosage, thinking above all of the lugubrious tones of the final “Thicker Blood”, close in the mood to the recent material of the tribulations.
However, the band's fourth album will not fail to have large consensus and, thanks to its relative ease in listening to the past, it will be able to further enlarge the audience of those who appreciate the band, now one of the most recognized Italian metal realities and celebrated outside our borders
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
