WINTERAGE
WINTERAGE "Nekyia"
By Dr. Abner Mality
Every now and then, I work up my nerve and dive into the world of Scarlet Records...the home of bombastic Italian power metal, overblown symphonic metal, tight-corseted opera divas and EVANESCENCE soundalikes. Occasionally one can strike gold in this fruity domain but you are just as likely to encounter massive amounts of cheese along with it.
WINTERAGE is close to an archetypal Scarlet Records band. I tried hard to get into "Nekyia" but had to yield to unrelenting symphonic bombast that made this sound more like something from La Scala than a metal album. Metal is here, do not doubt it, but the operatic/symphonic/folk material is the bulk of what this band does. I enjoy that kind of sound, but this band overdoes it. Only THERION can really carry this kind of melange off.
After the pompous into "Apertio ad Profundum", we get into "Simurgh The Firebird" which is not bad at all with the combination of RHAPSODY-style metal and classical bombast. The violin work here and on the album as a whole is quite exemplary and we get some shredding neoclassical guitar. "The Cult of Hecate" hits with ferocious blastbeats that soon give way to chants and classical instrumentation. So far, the album is good.
Alas, that's the peak. Some of the faux-Irish folk metal of "Numen" and "White Leviathan" makes me think of Lucky Charms cereal with its cliched approach while the title track is nothing special. "L'Fonte di Essenza" is a sad ballad with Pavarotti-like vocals and weeping violin. I did rather like "Metamorphosis: Macabre Ritual", where the metal/classical balance is just about right and the band playfully riffs on some well-known Halloween music.
There's meat here, but you have to dig through a lot of cheese and corn to find it. WINTERAGE are good at what they do, but I guess I'm just not the target audience.