ALBUM REVIEW: Onward – Black Therapy
To move onwards in your journey is to overcome the obstacles that oppress you. In the face of adversity, the old adage onwards and upwards is easier said than done. Yet for some, it is a spiritual rite of passage, a pilgrimage they must complete to conjure their personal evolution. For BLACK THERAPY, Onward is an audible diary of such journeys, inextricably inspired by their experiences of the pandemic. Powered by career-defining performances from guitarists Andrea Mataloni and Davide Celletti, and some of vocalist Giuseppe Di Giorgio’s most personal, private, and powerful lyrics, they graduate from death metal disciples to genre-defining gods.
Since 2013’s Symptoms Of A Common Sickness, BLACK THERAPY have delivered delicious death metal driven by old-school ideals. With Onward, they skip several revolutions around the sun, terraforming their planet into a soundscape of epic, cinematic melodic death metal soaked in classical arrangements, epic symphonica, and blackened death metal.
Opener Onward introduces you to BLACK THERAPY’s labyrinth of replayability, as you lose yourself time and time again in discovering its audible earworms that guide you along. It’s epic, it’s symphonic, and there are power solos that trail out like you’re traveling at lightspeed across a vast, cinematic landscape as sparse drum beats erupt like landmines in the distance. Take any of its nine tracks, like Blindness, Betray My Ideals or Behind The Glass, and you’ll continuously find yourself discovering something new, like you’re diving into an open-world video game rather than a record.
Whereas 2019’s Echoes Of Dying Memories felt two-dimensional, serving up straight-shooting death metal, Onward excels in its ability to connect emotion and sound, tentatively toying with your sense of space. Blindness’ harmonic riffs glisten like water rippling in the sun before blindsiding you with a tsunami of double-bass drumming hitting the shore of your senses. The Song Of My Absence lulls you into its lair, battering ram double bass drilling into your brain as Di Giorgio’s signature growls gurgle like echoes from below, inviting you in.
There’s a tendency for albums like Onward to lose momentum, especially when they’re stretching nine tracks over 45 minutes. Yet, not once do BLACK THERAPY ever feel like they’re retracing their steps, forever treading new ground – sometimes in the same song. Midway marker Together is the pièce de résistance of the album. Spiralling riffs ripple through your brain, double bass drumming rains down like meteors in your mind, and Di Giorgio delivers some of his fiercest growls alongside Mataloni and Celletti’s spellbinding solos; yet this cinematic journey of self-discovery is a love song wrapped in a nightmare, leaving you longing for your lover’s warmth: “All the hurdles that we had to face alone / Seem now so distant on a long forgotten road / What has grown inside both of us / Is a mutual feeling so pure and so strong.”
BLACK THERAPY are no strangers to darkness, despair and death in their lyrics. Their albums are treatise on the human experience of processing grief and pain, yet on Onward, they channel these very same feelings and thoughts of suffering into far more positive mantras. Whilst you might argue it’s at war with the melodic death metal that guides it, the juxtaposition ultimately compliments it, leaving you feeling empowered at every listen, particularly on the title track as Di Giorgio powerfully preaches: “Follow your heart, follow your dreams / Never give up and forever be free.”
If BLACK THERAPY’s previous albums acted as the journey, and the pandemic the catalyst, Onward is their greatest evolution. Simply put, melodic death metal hasn’t sounded this fierce, this empowering, or this damn good in quite some time.
Rating: 9/10
Onwards is set for release on June 10th via Black Lion Records.
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