ATMF aka Aeternitas Tenebrarvm Mvsicae Fvndamentvm, is a label that does surprise me time after time with excellent releases. Urna, An Autumn For Crippled Children, Arvas, Moonreich, Adamus Exul… It’s just a small selection of some great bands or projects which I was able to review some of their material before.
Now it’s time for Manthe by Italy’s Deadly Carnage, a fifty minutes seven-piece with a mostly brutal and intensive sound. The album opens with Drowned Hope, which starts with a rather melancholic and Prog-Post-Melo-alike acoustic piece. Yet after two minutes and a half, the song transforms into a slightly ‘timeless’ (read: old style-inspired yet performed within a modern expression) Doom / Death / Black track, highly influenced by the likes of early Anathema, Katatonia, Frailty, October Tide, Opeth or Graveworm. It’s melodic and catchy, yet at the same time breath-taking and technically high-skilled. There is quite some variety within each single epic, referring to the many tempo-changes, the interaction in between heavier and acoustic passages, the balance melodies – expulsions, and so on. Besides, the combination of the extremes ‘progression’ (especially leading riff-wise) and ‘tradition’ (and then I am mainly referring to the rhythm section and the more gothified melodies), as well as the injection of some Folk-alike elements, are details that might attract the listeners’ attention.
Despite the great performance, Deadly Carnage does not reach the level of the bands I compared them with on the former paragraph. The album consists of several grandiose parts for sure (listen for example to the almost Post-Black oriented grimness of Carved In Dust), but in general the album leaves me slightly unsatisfied. Especially the fact that there is not a specific remarkable evolution within the band’s existence (this album is the third full length, you see) is sad. But the core-fan of this genre (blackened Doom-Death, or doomish Melo-Black; whatever you want to call it…) will not dislike this material, that’s a certainty.