Ελληνικά
Last Updated on 11:08 AM by Giorgos Tsekas
Genre: Heavy Metal/ Progressive
Country: Finland
Label: Cruz del Sur Music
Year: 2017
The first release of a band may well be described as spontaneous, exciting, grandiose with a peculiar, sometimes genius and sometimes naive approach concerning its compositions. It all depends on the ability of the creators to bring it to life, to give flesh and bone, to put their thoughts and ideas in order. The right method of “mining” these ideas will be the springboard for the achievement of artists’ goals.
Mausoleum Gate, with their same titled album released three years ago, managed to gain the attention of several fans of the classic heavy sound. This was considered a great victory for the Finns, given the state in which the music scene falls into in recent years, with the thousands of bands that in vain try to be embraced by just a few. The solid marriage of dirty, tough 80’s sound with vintage 70’s aesthetics rightly found a great appeal, and we, in turn, invested in a diamond for our collection that accompanies us even today in the afternoons and evenings by filling our “world” with immortal, traveling melodies.
But, time has come for the band to make the next step. The dilemma was lying on whether they would continue to create music in the style of their debut or to deliberately differentiate, to a point, from the material that brought them out, highlighting their artistic anxieties. With “Into A Dark Divinity,” the band makes clear that there is no mood for repetition or need for them to copy themselves.
Moving their sound even deeper into the labyrinths of 70’s musicology, they sound more pompous than the debut with the morbid smile of the keys overcrowding the compositions, questioning the protagonist role of guitars as the main means expressing their music and externalizing their emotions. With this strategy they gain in atmosphere and feeling, but they are lagging behind in many places in dynamics and hardness, which in no way characterizes as inanimate the material of this album.
Just as with its predecessor, “Into A Dark Divinity” includes six compositions of a total of forty-one minutes. The differentiation, apart from the core of the compositions, certainly occurs in the long-lasting songs, which are half in proportion, while in the debut we had two of the 6 songs to be over six minutes. Elaborating on the details now, the album is synthesized unequally in contrast to its predecessor, where there was a consistency of exceptional ideas and repeated bursts of inspired moments. Let’s firstly deal with the three short pieces “Burn the Witches at Dawn”, “Horns” and “Solomon’s Key”. In the first two, we find simple, fast rock without any surprises and without the sprite that featured the similar structured “brothers” of the first album. Some inspirational sparks are hidden in the solo but the inelegant V-PVarpula’s high ones don’t flatter and do not give anything more to the already bad ideas. In “Solomon’s Key” you ‘listen’ to self-confidence, since it is crystal clear that the style that suits them is the slow, mysterious, full of classical techniques in solo one, the full of keys bridges that give an eerie tint and the chorus that overflows with passion. But the true essence of the story lies in the long-lasting songs, “Condemned to Darkness”, “Apophis” and “Into a Dark Divinity”. Here lies the grandeur of the album. Time stops and the emotions born during the hearing reach up to the medulla of the soul. Creations that act underground by sending vibrations to the nuclei of our sensors. Here the Finns document their gracious dedication to the magic and style of the progenitors of progressive rock. Melancholic epics full of intoxicating melodies that highlight, first and foremost, the spearhead intelligent changes of guitar themes with the incredibly inspired key ideas. The long duration of these compositions is not a negative fact since smoothness of flow, fluctuations and rhythm changes keep the listener alert.
With yet another positive sign as far as the visual part of the album (coupled with its debut) and the hot production are concerned, Mausoleum Gate are the winners in betting with themselves. Brave explorers of “strange” sounds for the average metal fan, the Finns have to invest more in this difficult journey. As is well known, the second album is the one that demonstrates whether the intentions of a group are serious or not. But the third album is the one that will clarify if it really is a really big band. Everything shows that the Finns got what they need, but until we see more, we can only listen to two of the finest samples of the scene in recent years. Excellent.
4,5/6
