vote
7.5
- Band:
The Bleak Picture - Duration: 00:45:20
- Available from: 06/27/2025
- Label:
-
Ardua Music
Only one year after the debut “Meaningless”, The Bleak Picture, group born in 2021 by the collaboration between the singer Tero Ruohonen and the polystrumenist Jussi Häninen, both members of the Blackster Autumnfall, return in 2021. The purpose of this parallel experience is the search for nostalgic sounds, which resume a past of which the two Finnish musicians are genuinely passionate.
As for its predecessor, also for “Shades of Life” the primary influences are to be found in a certain Doom-Death Metal that marked the 90s, in particular bands such as Paradise Lost, Anathema or Katatonia, but also the Gothic Metal of Throes of Dawn and the purest Gothic Rock represent a significant component. Sounds and atmospheres that, since the opening song, “plagued by smirow”, are familiar to us, but they are the frequent melodic openings with a wave flavor that make these pieces take on very precise contours, necessary to emerge from the multitude of proposals of the genre. Moments of deep dismay based on dry and austere riffs, guided by the vocal lines of Ruohonen, who knows how to dose a deep growling and captivating clean parts, supported by a low button and a synthesizers carpet.
The first songs are quite homogeneous by structure and atmospheres, perhaps even too much, but, as already happened with “Meaningless”, it is in the second part that the disc definitively takes altitude: “Without the I” is charged with negative energy in the first Swallow The Sun style, “Silent Exit”, with its eleven minutes of duration, grows by magniloquence during its development, with a reason that seems to repeat itself of intensity. And a voice supported by the echo that becomes more and more aggressive, while the final “City of Ghosts”, on the contrary, is gloomy, funeral, a shredded lament on a racing and disturbing sound substrate, as if the intent was to turn off even the last thread of hope.
“Shades of Life” is a disc in which the common thread is melancholy, but at the same time rich in shades that are perceived with listening and convincing because the two Nordic artists, while fishing with tradition from tradition, do not just repeat already consolidated formulas.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
