SEDNA – Sila Nuna

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  SEDNA
• Duration: 00:55:41
• Available from: 11/21/2024
• Label:

• Dusktone

Sedna's painful and multifaceted path today reaches the threshold of their fourth long-lasting studio work, after the abysmal echoes of “The Man Behind The Sun” and the similar successor “Last Sun”, released a couple of years ago.
Following changes in the line-up, unfortunately frequent in the history of the band, Alex Crisafulli gathers around a new nucleus of musicians who accompany him in this new sound experimentation in a post-black metal key. After the thunderous roar of the previous work, it seems that Sedna have this time sought a return to a more primordial, ferocious style, which recovers heaviness and concrete aggression, while still supported by a composite and carefully elaborated atmospheric system. Lyrically and stylistically therefore, “Sila Nuna” abandons cosmic themes and references in favor of an earthly approach, glacial to be precise, linked to the legends of the Inuit glacial populations, evoking the most important and iconic figures in the succession of traces.

“Torngarsuk” opens the curtain with some delicate chords that introduce a song that is actually rocky and severe, an emblematic indicator of the new course undertaken by the band due to its concentration around their more typically black metal inspirations, naturally declined in its more existentialist and depressive vein.
It is perhaps no coincidence that some of the most powerful emotional outbursts, such as those caused by the dramatic dynamics of “Amarok” or the poignant melodies of the final “Sedna”, see the collaboration of some members of Psychonaut 4, a prominent name in the most catastrophic black metal scene and a perfect combination for the already cathartic interpretations of Crisafulli on vocals.
The group's skill lies above all in its natural aptitude for interpreting music in a natural and instinctive manner, thanks for example to an imaginative and incisive drum performance, or to particularly effective bass interventions at specific moments of the songs.
This nefarious (in a – paradoxically – positive) alchemy between musicians marks the passages of “Tulugaq”, which from the doom/sludge fragments of the past leads to the creation of a poisonous and bewitching song, or to the evolutions of “Arnajuinnaq” and its progressive transition from a traditionally black song to a gradual fusion with the more contemplative instances always possessed by the Cesenatic combo.

Although the previous work remains of perhaps unparalleled beauty, we like the more urgent vein interpreted in “Sila Luna”, because it shows a mutation consistent with its past and a desire for maturation that continues to keep the project energetic and exciting.
Sedna's latest album is a complex work full of creative ideas, which insists on its most impetuous sides without forgetting to properly exalt its tormented, restless soul, linked to pain and the hope of a redemption that perhaps will never arrive.