Critic's evaluation
Just over a year after announcing Zebathy and two months after releasing Terrifying Lullaby, multi-instrumentalist Fabiano Negri has surprised us with a new album. Entitled Mysteries The Night Hides, his eighth studio album offers a joint exploration of heavy metal and the horror drama genre.
The atmosphere is nocturnal. The sky, with its few but grayish clouds blocking out the intense glow of a mystical night, offers an almost fabulous atmosphere. In it, tension and fear go hand in hand, leaving the character in a frequently alert pose, with his muscles stiffened and his pupils generously dilated. When you glimpse a canyon through the soot, what you see causes disgust, dread and repulsion. Cannibalistic carnage has turned the dewy grass into a heap of bloodied bodies. And the soundtrack to this terrifying scene comes in the form of heavy metal mixed with hints of doom metal and symphonic metal. Icy in its essence, the title track is adorned by a dark and numbing melodic climate that, narrated by a timbre tuned to its driving consistency, highlights not only morbidity, but also melancholy as emotive-sensory elements that permeate its structure. Reminiscent, at times, of Ritchie Kotzen's vocals, Fabiano Negri turns the work into a plot whose character openly coexists with death. But not death in the figurative sense. After all, while the title track manages to make the listener see themselves walking among dry branches scattered among the graves of a cemetery, the smell of carrion is another extrasensory sensation that Negri provides. With all these elements, the protagonist of this progressive, icy and funereal opener finds himself in the company of a lifeless, soulless, pale, cold and eyeless figure. The perfect human-morbid representation of the absence of brightness, vivacity and, above all, gratitude for life. The character's challenge, therefore, lies in his ability not to be seduced by manipulation into giving up and the cowardice of throwing himself into the darkness of eternal torpor.
The setting is even more terrifying than the one presented earlier. Without any light, it's only the sound that matters. And it's not at all pleasant. Creeping sounds suggest the repugnant, while the grotesque also takes shape. Starting with a roar that combines cynicism with a kind of masochistic provocation, the melody is presented in its entirety. Raw, but without the weight that its sound aesthetic demands, it is curiously more digestive and with a harmony that is apparently intended to be deceptively cheerful and contagious. Surrounded by a melancholy, numbing texture under the Iron Maiden-style heavy metal foundations, A Necessary Evil is, in fact, more pop, if you can call it that, even if it has a densely hallucinatory bias in its lacerating aroma. Embraced by a chorus that is curiously contagious in its hopelessness, the song tells of the arrival, the birth of the Devil's son. A figure capable of synthesizing all the disharmony on the planet and exposing falsehood. An individual who removes the structural blindness and reveals a humanity with no real sense of empathy, creating a community structure based on individualism and the collective blindness of a false structural perfectionism.
Sweet, icy and melancholy, the new landscape dawns adorned with a dense layer of drama provided by the softened and sad pronunciation of the piano keys. As soon as a sudden waltz provided by the overflight of the violin's synthetic sonar, like a ghostly breeze, is felt, the melody enters a latent melodramatic punch fostered by the harmony between the guitars. Flowing into an intimate and brooding verse, Vampires takes on a morbidly danceable and linear structure until the outburst of a dramatic guitar solo that aesthetically recreates the energy exuded by Slash in his solo on November Rain, a Guns and Roses single. It's no wonder that, here too, the listener finds himself unprotected and embraced by a torrential downpour that accompanies him into a visceral and touching outpouring of deep sadness at not being able to experience a new tomorrow. As its name suggests, therefore, Vampires is a narrative based on vampire mythology, in which beings feed on the blood and essence of others, without being able to see sunlight and only guaranteeing themselves by the cold and gloomy night climate. Vampires is the story of a couple who have recently become vampires, which gives the song dark romantic touches and a numbingly melancholic libido.
The scene is one of contagious mysticism and dread. While the clouds touch the ground, causing a thick layer of fog, the sunset in the background seems to lose its grace, its life. Then the roar of the wind over the rocks of the cliff creates ghostly sounds capable of pleasing the children of the night, giving them a sleep numbed by structural sadness and the comforting absence of joy. For them, the nightmare is a balm, a pleasure that makes falling asleep more comfortable and attractive. Between lightning and thunder, the moonlight becomes more and more chaotic for those with sanity, but a lovely warmth for those who live in darkness. Capable of creating a dense, tense and gloomy atmosphere just like that of Kashmir, a single by Led Zeppelin, Terrifying Lullaby still has its own aggressive texture that flirts with thrash metal. This is how the song presents a plot about a girl manipulated by the melody of death. A sound not heard by everyone, but which, for the protagonist, torments her, infuriates her and makes her aggressive. A song that strips her of her conscience, her sanity and makes her revere and spread the plague and disease. From this song onwards, the girl is seized by a weapon. The weapon of the melody which, every time it is heard and danced to, causes the death of innocent people.
Like Vampires, it is born melancholic. However, its sadness has interesting nauseating touches that give the introductory melody a kind of manipulative torpor. Sweet in its sadness, it brings an intimate and visceral storyline that, through Negri's interpretation, becomes generous and broadly dramatic. Aesthetically minimalist, The Raven's Feast brings a mystical and tenebrous darkness in which the witches' laughter reverberates through the dry trees. This laughter is the sound of satisfaction at having succeeded in causing the protagonist to sink into grief and to lose the possibility of seeing a way out of such a sense of lamentation. The Raven's Feast can even sound like a social critique, as it brings a line that can be inserted into the political field, as it verbalizes "they're coming to eat the carcass of those who promised what they couldn't do". And so it serves as a feast for the birds of death, which feed on guilt, remorse, suffering and also on bad character and lies.
First of all, it has to be said that although it's possible, you have to know how to do it. Bringing together a musical genre, a dark side of rock, with a literary genre is, in fact, a dream, a desire of many musicians and authors. Fortunately, for Fabiano Negri it wasn't just a dream. It was a reality achieved with Mysteries The Night Hides, a dark, morbid, dramatic and gloomy album.
Drawing on obscure vampire mythologies and featuring characters in a constant relationship with death, Negri manages, curiously and unreasonably, to create a kind of romance between the suffering protagonists and the omnipresent figure of death.
Between obscure, densely dark and mystical landscapes, Mysteries The Night Hides manages to move towards melodrama, but also towards melodic density. Also produced by Negri, the album's mixing, although capable of making the listener perceive and taste the melodic nuances proposed, which by the way move between heavy metal, doom metal, symphinic metal and thrash metal, didn't deliver the pressure that the soundscapes demanded for each of its five chapters.
Even so, the listener can admire the compositions, the intentions and the stories that range from the birth of the Devil's son to the hypnotism of a girl from the sound of death. For this reason, the album is not easily digestible. After all, its textures are deliberately disgusting and disgusting.
Rounding off the technical scope is the cover art. Also signed by Negri, it presents his face with a form sanctified by the beings of the underworld. These beings are represented by repulsive and stunning contours that surround the bust as if in worship. It is the light of darkness giving freedom to the slaves of the night.
Released on 12/01/2023 in an independent way, Mysteries The Night Hides is a terrifying and disgusting album that proposes a happy fusion between horror and heavy metal. It's where Fabiano Negri gives freedom to the beings of the underworld and makes death an omnipresent and absolute protagonist who radiates torpor, fear and insecurity from the moonlight.
