Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Adimiron
Label: Self-released
Release: 2009
Runtime: 58:43
Rating: 3.5/5
Until recently, Adimiron were a complete unknown on the average listener’s radar. But at least since Death Angel’s last visit, and partly thanks to the band’s unobtrusive and very professional promotion of their music, this young Italian quintet has finally caught some attention on our side too. First, a heads-up: on their second album, the full-length When Reality Wakes Up this crew of Roman sound legionaries is anything but a standard thrash product. Adimiron are a band still hunting for the musical expression that suits them best, and they pour their creativity into goblets of all different shapes and sizes. They’ve got more faces than a single genre allows, and a split musical personality like that has a hard time laying granite foundations for a sizable base of fired-up listeners. So is this just an experiment, or is the search for their true self and sound something we should be worried about?
The band formed in 1999, and in those earliest, dewiest days they were still tuned to grind-flavored death metal. The product of that gradual genesis, and of the awakening of different approaches to the core of the music, is a string of releases: the demo Everlasting Fight, the EP Eclipse and the debut Burning Souls. In the in-between period, which they present full and juicy on When Reality Wakes Up with a rich progressive layer of lush instrumentals, a Nevermore-style heart started pounding in their chests, while today Adimiron are committed to a hybrid of pure math, brutality and Meshuggah-style imagery. Let’s rather take a step back, because that in-between era of progressive thrash is the one that gets all our loving attention this time around!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae9HT0u4z6I
The album opens with Desperades, which stands out for its full, electrified production. The guitar duo of bristling, rhythm-obsessed math nerds Alessandro Castelli and Danilo Valentini, backed by the fat bass of young four-stringer Maurizio Villeato and drummer Federico Maragoni, sprinkles a healthy dose of gunpowder to stoke your passions. The problem comes with vocalist Andrea Spinelli, who sounds very precise and good but has chronic trouble with his English pronunciation. Even though in terms of vocal range he holds his own quite respectably against the raspy voice of Warrel Dane, he’s missing that finishing touch and lyrics that sound a bit more natural. Wrong Side Of The Town sounds more kerosene-fueled, penetrating deep with the post-thrash beauty of its guitars in a salted-Opeth kind of way. After the opening riff comes disappointment in the form of rather pointless lyrical rambling. Forgiveness is an even more painful listening moment, with far fewer growled sequences, and the oratorio of music needlessly reins in and holds back the burning desire for speed. My personal favorite this time round is Choice For a Mask, which has both a sense of sensuality and a bit less glittering distortion – in an epic way. Let’s forget for a moment about the pronunciation and the slightly clumsy word structures, step out of the English-obsessed crowd and beam ourselves onto the neutral ground of planet X. There, the whole thing is perfectly functional and melodically convincing. There’s not a gram missing of what you’d need to give yourself over fully to the pleasure of the music. Near Eastern rhythms, or an echo of music from long-besieged Roman provinces, flare up in Mindoll. The admirable parts of this listen are undoubtedly the excellent, plentiful and, in their variability and colorfulness, elusive guitar riffs. A big plus for the record comes from drummer Federico Maragoni, who scatters wealth of rhythm and changes of both style and rhythmic meter. There are plenty of complex structures that offer no consolation, and even less consolation in the announcement of changes to come. The disharmony of Das Experiment clearly points to a tendency to tie Gordian knots on an already far-from-simple spiral of genetic code. The guys show their own kind of fun and rock-solid nerve in choosing the only non-original track on the record. Prodigy broke new ground in the music world with brutal electronics and the track Spitfire on the album Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned in the by-now rather distant year of 2004, and Adimiron do them no injustice with their metal version, tailoring electronic punk nicely to metal brutality. The title track leans on electronic samples and clear guitar tones like pearly spring water. The instrumental interlude carries on into Still Winter Within, which with its theatrical overkill doesn’t build on the pleasure sketched out earlier. Neither does the melancholy of Endevouring, nor the superb closing act, the pompous explosion of a cosmic supernova that is Flag Of Sinners. The rhythm is lacy and kitschy, and Adimiron master the game of playing with sounds the way you’d expect, but with the wrong running order, and with some filler that’s clearly twisted for no good reason, the record leaves the listener with rather mixed feelings.
I’ve got nothing against schizophrenia or complication, since there’s tons of it in the opus of Heavy Davy and his SYL. I’m also not disgusted by the math of rhythms, forever accelerating to the end and then braking almost dead on the line, which you can hear plenty of in jazz, in metalcore and its rougher deathy variant, or in the complexity of bands like Meshuggah or Despised Icon. What bugs me is the inconsistency of feeling: in the sinusoid of broken ups and downs you can’t tell whether to take the stimulants or the sedatives, and the band occasionally overdoes the dosage in its musical laxatives, so the end result is confusing and leaves a ton of unanswered questions for a third, fourth or even fifth record. What Adimiron still have in store will be shown by time, and the hourglass measuring the patience and presence of the fired-up audience is approaching its cataclysmic moment of final truth!
This review was written in collaboration between RockLine and Rock Hard Slovenija.
Lineup
Andrea Spinelli – vocals
Alessandro Castelli – guitar
Danilo Valentini – guitar
Federico Maragoni – drums, percussion
Maurizio Villeato – bass
Production
Adimiron & Luigi Stefanini
Track list
1. Desperates
2. Wrong side Of The Town
3. Forgiveness
4. Choice For A Mask
5. Mindoll
6. Das Experiment
7. Spitfire
8. When Reality Wakes up
9. Still Winter Within
10. Endevouring
11. Flag Of Sinners
