ALBUM REVIEW: The Inheritance of Beauty – Winterage

There’s a million and one symphonic metal bands, often aping everyone from NIGHTWISH to RHAPSODY OF FIRE. So where does the sophomore effort from Italian symphonic maestros WINTERAGE fit in? Well, it may be stereotypical to assume that they take large influence from countrymen RHAPSODY OF FIRE but it would also be absolutely correct. The Inheritance of Beauty is symphonic in all the right places with more cheese than the World Cheese Awards, quasi-operatic vocals and frequent widdly guitar solos.

Opener Ouverture begins with a choir that wouldn’t be out of place at the opera, with deep strings and brassy horns. The band are known for using full orchestras during their recordings – emphasis on full – even throwing in timpanis along with their kitchen sink approach to writing. It clearly takes a great many cues from symphonies and medieval music, offering elongated introduction to the wonderful world of WINTERAGE where more is more and less is unacceptable. It’s a full four-plus minutes before we’re treated to the first guitars in second song The Inheritance of Beauty. 

The album is themed around the fight of beauty against decadence It tells the story of Botticelli‘s Venus, representing authentic art, who has turned back to stare at our world. What she sees is decadence, the forgetting of art’s values and the abandonment of nature. It’s certainly a high-handed concept and the band, while peddling music as cheesy and campy as symphonic metal comes, approaches it with the kind of po-faced seriousness that could all too easily lead to ridicule. 

Violinist and songwriter/composer Gabriele Boschi truly gives it his all though, and does exercise deftness with his arrangements. Lush choirs and orchestras are often the backbone of the album but don’t overshadow the guitar work when it does step out of its supporting role to offer a solo or six. Daniele Barbarossa uses his operatic wailing more sparingly than might be expected. 

WINTERAGE’s sophomore effort is every bit as indulgent and decadent as the concept and their influences suggest; frequently completely overblown in its bombast. This, though it sounds like it, isn’t a criticism. Rather, it’s to make clear what you let yourself in for. The shortest of the first nine songs is a hair under four minutes and the band have the audacity to close with a sixteen (!) minute epic in The Amazing Toymaker, the opening of which is a gleefully twee glockenspiel and serene violins underpinning a narrator who speaks for no less than four minutes of the song. This mini rock opera is gargantuan; there’s simply no other word for it and the rest of The Inheritance of Beauty is dwarfed in comparison. Multiple vocal styles changing points of view, totally over the top arrangements and an excellent violinist; it’s so cheesy, it’s a wonder nobody tried chasing it down a hill yet.

If you love symphonic metal that throws all caution to the wind, chucks in everything, including the kitchen sink, as well as a few weird extras it found stuffed down the back of the sofa and tops it all off with the kind of soaring interplay between every element, WINTERAGE will leave the biggest, daftest grin on your face. It’s a solid effort from one of symphonic metal’s more promising newcomers.

Rating: 7/10

The Inheritance of Beauty is out now via Scarlet Records.

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