SEREMONIA: Neonlusifer (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

While since its beginnings, it had shown itself particularly fertile, producing four albums in five years, Seremonia then walled itself up in a silence that was not like it. As one of the most talented bands of the seventies revival, mixing dark doom and folk, the Finns were highly expected. Almost six years after "Pahuuden Äänet", they finally decided to record a fifth offering.

Published like its elders by the indispensable Svart Records, "Neonlusifer" reveals itself first of all through a strange visual and a occult title, two clues of a content that we guess is still as weird and personal as ever. With an identity that belongs only to him, Seremonia has not used these years of abstinence to change his recipe. Eight laments are linked together, shrouded in the forest psychedelia with which its progenitors are still associated. Like a shamanic poetry, Noora Federley dispenses her haunted presence recognizable between thousand while her companions weave the canvas at the same time heavy and progressive of a nocturnal and nevertheless colored procession.

The fans will not be disoriented. But won't they be disappointed by an imprint as sonorous as sensitive whose mysterious charm seems to have evaporated a bit? In fact, "Neonlusifer" struggles to make a lasting impression on the memory. Its tracks follow one another, often stirring ('Naamiot'), always carrying in their flesh this singularity to which participate as much the recourse to the Finnish language as this rooting in a misty and bucolic humus but suffer from a faded charm. Their minimalism and their rough energy, almost punk at times ('Kaivon Pohjalla'), do not help to make them warm.

And it is necessary to wait to see him slowing down the tempo and stretching ghostly ambiences so that this fifth album declares a beauty as hypnotic as underground. Oscillating between seven and nine minutes approximately, 'Raskasta Vettä' and 'Maailmanlopun Aamuna' offer to the group the rare occasions to dig this progressive furrow mixed with black psychedelism that inoculate rusty guitars, pallid Mellotron and country flute with crimson accents (at the time of "Lizard"). The result is less accessible, probably less immediate and requires many listenings to unravel the obscure sap nestled in an even more bizarre intimacy.

Without losing its inimitable style, Seremonia cultivates more than ever its darkest and most abrupt features, as if it was trying to dissolve the charm and beauty of its antediluvian doom prog in a tub of acid, at the risk of slightly disappointing... But the Finns are still this curious entity coming from the cold and smoky forests. - Official website

SEREMONIA

NEONLUSIFER

SVART RECORDS

DOOM