GAEREA: Coma (BLACK METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Gaerea is not a particularly original band, with its hooded musicians and its black metal in the cold, torrent-like vein of the tutelary Mgla, which doesn't make it any less interesting and hasn't prevented it from standing out from the crowd. “Limbo” and “Mirage” (released in 2022) are sure to appeal to fans of post-modern art noir, and too bad for the rest of us, the ones who feel that Gaerea is simply riding a wave.

And yet, you'd have to be either deaf or incorrigibly dishonest not to recognize the Portugueses' talent for building a sound edifice that is both robust and sinuous, from which ooze painful atmospheres that are not without beauty. Too much, perhaps, to the point of sounding smooth, almost mawkish at times. This is the only (relative) criticism that can be made of “Coma”, a fourth offering in the tradition of its elders, with no surprises but a telluric power that rumbles in the bowels of compositions whose more compact length (between 4 and 5 minutes on average) doesn't stifle their tortuous architecture.

Indeed, one of the band's great strengths lies in their ability to pour out haunting melodies that stay in the memory, as illustrated by the eponymous track whose venomous guitars mate with raging blasts to create a crushing landscape that is nonetheless cracked by intimate, petrified moments. The whole album oscillates between sharp brutality and heart-rending emotion, a balance that is at its most perfect with the immense - and best track of the album - ‘The Poet's Ballet’, an opener full of contrasts whose seven minute combine the most dramatic sadness with the most unbridled ardor.

This structuring combination could be redundant, but Gaerea knows how to vary his approach, here with guitars cloaked in thick despair (‘Shapeshifter’), there by casting their black metal in a quasi-progressive tub (‘Kingdom Of Thorns’) or by riding on a terrain both heavy and emphatic (‘Hope Shatters’), when they don't dare the (almost) ballad (Wilted Flower').

All in all, it's hard not to succumb to “Coma”, which should further establish the authority of Gaerea, who confirms that they deserve better than their follower status, as they are endowed with a very real identity, nestling in those emotional outpourings of which they have more than ever the secret. But this will no doubt not be enough to erase the (over)calibrated band image that will always cling to them. - Official website

GAEREA

COMA

SEASON OF MIST

BLACK METAL