Band: FROSTMOON ECLIPSE
Location: La Spezia, Ligury
Country: Italy
Genre: Black metal
Full Length: Worse Weather To Come
Label: Immortal Frost Productions
Format: CD, vinyl, streaming
Release date: October 25, 2019
Frostmoon Eclipse has been active in the Italian black metal scene since the first Norwegian bands made headlines, and today they are considered one of Italy’s oldest established black metal bands. I joined the party late, having heard of them only last month, and missed their entire catalog from 1995 to the present, including albums like “Gathering The Dark,” “Another Face Of Hell” and “The End Stands Silent.” While I have loads of catching up to do should I decide to and trace their evolution, listening to their new full length “Worse Weather To Come” is not a bad way to get started.
Though the band is technically classified as black metal, their songwriting can be attributed to melodic doom, goth metal, post-metal, even progressive rock, psychedelia, early grunge, and classical guitar. It’s a welcome vouchsafing that musical revision comes from within, and the band doesn’t try to cram several labels together in a single breath. After all, labels say so much about how underground bands express themselves. Bands with similar classifications have their own perspectives and techniques, and one listen to “Worse Weather To Come” should be enough to convince you Frostmoon Eclipse are standing on their own merit.
While “Worse Weather To Come” has a raw sound, it doesn’t depend solely on rawness to get its point across. Frostmoon Eclipse has a way of conveying profound, intense feelings through constant variations in feel and tone presented in every song. This album is so complex and multi-layered it keeps you guessing as to which soundscapes it plans to enter. The compositions can’t be pinned to the 1990s or 2000s any more than a single genre, but the passages from one emotional state to the next are cleverly devised. The band’s strength is in writing and composing songs with their own distinct personalities and temperament, depending on what best fits each of them. Ice-covered, delicate or trance-inducing, no two tracks sound exactly the same on this album.
The band’s raw sound has something for fans of Bathory, Mayhem, Enslaved, and Satyricon, and you’ll likewise hear elements for listeners of Sear Bliss, Paradise Lost, Anathema, Katatonia, My Dying Bride, Necrophagia and Black Sabbath. This multiformity and distinctiveness capture the essence of black and goth metal at its most arcane level, and the histrionic overtones Frostmoon Eclipse achieve are far more penetrating than you would expect from a band drawing from so many different genres. The band has taken great pains to compound on the antediluvian themes we have heard countless times. Even the clean guitar and bass sections sound as if the strings are caked in the dirt of ancient crypts if you have the resoluteness to enter.
“Worse Weather To Come” convinces me that Frostmoon Eclipse and bands like them will be making more headway for black metal to progress in the 2020s. Contact Immortal Frost Productions for more information. -Dave Wolff
Lineup:
Lorenzo Sassi: Vocals
Claudio Alcara: Guitars
Davide Gorrini: Bass
Gionata Potenti: Drums
J.J.: Guest vocals on “Song To Darkness”
Track list:
1. I See the Void
2. A Room, a Grave
3. All Is Undone
4. Sunken
5. Brother Denial
6. Sleep
7. Song to Darkness
8. Resignation
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