The Industrial Twilight: Octavia Sperati - "Grace Submerged" [2007]

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Octavia Sperati - "Grace Submerged" [2007]

Artist: Octavia Sperati

Title: Grace Submerged

Genre: Gothic/Doom Metal

Country: Norway
Year: 2007

Track List:

Guilty Am I
Moonlit
Going North
Don't Believe a Word (Thin Lizzy cover)
...And Then the World Froze
The Final Rest
Deprivation
Provenance of Hate
Dead End Poem
Submerged

Norwegian girls from Bergen, playing a heavier (doom-influenced) but still very beautiful kind of gothic metal. Their debut album "Winter Enclosure" (2005) is good too, but this one is my favourite. As I've said, they aren't like the other female fronted goth metal bands (and definitely don't suffer from the "Nightwish syndrome"), but on the other hand, their music is as close as it gets to my definition of "gothic metal". The atmosphere on "Grace Submerged" is great, apparently influenced by the nature and the winters in Norway. If you need a download link, you can search for it on filestube, as always.

On metal-archives.com "Grace Submerged" received 95 points out of 100, with a comment: "Not bad... for girls". I'd give this album no less than 9 out of 10 too - and not only because it was recorded by an (almost)all-female band, which is still not very common on metal scene. Right now the band is on hiatus, the guitarist (Gyri) plays in Tristania, and the lead singer (Silje) now sings in The Gathering, replacing Anneke van Giersbergen.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About this blog

I created this blog mostly because I wanted to practise my English skills, and to showcase the industrial, gothic, punk, metal, neofolk and progressive rock scene of Russia/ex-USSR and Eastern Europe (especially Hungary) in the meanwhile.

As you can see, this blog doesn't take itself seriously enough, but I hope I'm doing good enough with my reviews even if my proficiency in English is limited. Along with the aforementioned stuff from Eastern Europe, I occasionally post some classic and rare albums that aren't to be missed, and generally whatever I want. Other categories of note:

* finno-ugric rarities - various music (including pop) in minor Finno-Ugric languages which I'm interested in because of my heritage. The music from Hungary, Finland and Estonia can be found under the respective categories;

* lo-fi - various poorly recorded demos from before 2000 that are of historical importance. Most of these demos come from the USSR era, so you might want to check out the USSR category as well.

As of now, I try to post only music that has already been made free by the artists themselves, or the rare old releases that are out of print. But if you're an artist and would like me to remove the download links of your work, just contact me using the form below.

Sorry, I don't do reviews by request, I don't have the time. Moreover, I think the bands that feel the need to advertise themselves by sending their demos to as many blogs as possible are usually just plain boring. If you want to contact me for any other reason, use the contact form below.

It should be obvious enough that reviewing anything on here doesn't equals endorsement of artists' personal views. This especially concerns neofolk and martial industrial. It'd be fair enough to say that I have the same approach to the political and religious topics in these genres as Laibach do.

Many of the female musicians featured on my blog are amateur models, and in many cases their modelling work is no less interesting than their music. Right now I'm working on giving it a separate section of the blog (just in case if anyone wants my review to be only about their music and not their looks). The work is in progress, check back later if you're interested.

The title of my blog comes from a song by The Kovenant (album "SETI", 2003).