Infernalizer – After Dark
Infernalizer – After Dark
Rockshots Records
Release Date: 27.10.23
Running Time: 35:58
Review by Dark Juan
6/10
Good morning, world. It is a cold but bright day at Crow Cottage, and your faithful correspondent feels like a bag of hammered shite. Yet, Dark Juan does not let the small matter of a serious chest infection he has carried around for three weeks stop him doing the things that he loves (mainly drinking, wenching and consuming “party treats” in vast quantities), accompanied by a soundtrack that encompasses as much filthy dirty extremity as possible. However, Dark Juan does not merely cleave the extreme. Dark Juan is fond of melody and atmospherics as well as having his head pummelled to a bloody pulp as well as being more than a little fond of the shadows and the candlelit, smoky world of Goth.
It is with this in mind, then, that Dark Juan has once more wound up the steampunk, clockwork-powered Platter Of Splatter™ and is glowering seductively at it in a fashion pioneered by the likes of Louis De Pointe Du Lac as it plays the latest album by Infernalizer, being “After Dark”. Infernalizer is fronted by Claudio Ravinale of Italian Death Metal veterans Disarmonia Mundi among others, and “After Dark” is a Danzig / Rob Zombie / Alice Cooper inspired 80’s / Gothic Metal album and follow up to 2021’s debut record, “The Ugly Truth”. Now, let us see whether Claudio cuts the mustard with Goffik stuff, because Dark Juan is well known to be a Sad Old Goff, extremely picky about anything at all even slightly tinged with Goth and an elder, so Signor Ravinale has some work to do to impress this Sisters Of Mercy and black obsessed reviewer. Let us begin…
The album opens with an instrumental piece, ‘Season Of The Witch’, which (sic) sets the scene for some spookiness with sepulchral synths and slowly building guitar before breaking into the first proper song, which is ‘The Dark Passenger’. On my very first impression I was unimpressed with the vocal, which I considered too far forward in the mix and the vocal style to be too harsh. However, on repeated listening, Dark Juan found that the vocals are actually fine, slightly jarring, if just the wrong side of gravelly and aggressive (think Mr. Lordi as the benchmark for this kind of bubblegum, shiny Gothic Pop Metal) but they are at least in tune and Claudio really does give it all with his performance when he lets rip. His more baritone crooning hits the spot though – deep and sexy and resonant and guaranteed to relieve Goth girls of their underwear in next to no time.
Infernalizer fuse Gothic Metal with the kind of choruses that had loads of people who damaged the ozone layer with their hairspray waving their lighters (further knackering the ozone layer) about in Enormo-Dome stadia back in the 80’s, and then chuck in some of the retro-futurism of Synthwave and Darkwave to underpin the guitar work with swoopiness and ethereal wafting. ‘Death Wish’ appears to have inadvertently taken Billy Idol’s ‘White Wedding’ as the basis for the guitar work for the verse for the first bar…
The end result is kind of like Whiplasher Bernadotte of Deathstars and Papa Emeritus III and Mr. Lordi all sweaty and naked in a good old meat triangle, all tangled together, with Peter Steele chortling and offering direction while filming it and using Alice Cooper to perform a soundtrack and using Glenn Danzig as a camera stand because he’s so short.
Jesus, my imagination. My poor imagination.
Anyway, ‘This Is My Yard’ is a bit of an oddball – appearing to try to combine Stadium Rock with Hardcore on the chorus with not a lot of success, it ends up being a disjointed, staggering kind of a song that really needs to be shot and put out of its misery. ‘Falling In Slow Motion’ changes gear again, with a decent enough stab at Operatic Gothic Metal of the classic kind with lots of guitars, emotional female singing (sounds a bit like a more alto Liv Christine on this tune) and deep-voiced male crooning and lots of keyboard swooping about and being all misty forest like. It really did conjure up images of down at heel young noblepersons lamenting a lot in decrepit, draughty castles tottering to their fall somewhere in fucking Carpathia or something, faded taffeta gowns and frock coats streaming in endless breezes while cruel patriarchs stick their aged noses into relationships they don’t think are proper, because they are upper-crust ponces who got emotionally hurt four decades ago.
Singles ‘What Did You Expect?’ and ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ are the best songs on here by far – both have absolutely banging choruses that ape the epic singalongs of the 80’s together with some fist-pumping, tight-trousered riffing which is pretty tasty, and the songs themselves fun and easy to listen to. ‘What Did You Expect?’ really hammers the Ghost analogue with a more aggressive singer button. I mean really hammers it. It’s probably broken now.
However, “After Dark” really doesn’t SAY anything. It is functionless art. And functionless art is merely tolerated vandalism. It has no reason for being except the creator of it wanted to do it and that robs it of some power and clarity. However, Claudio Ravinale himself says that the album is designed to be entertainment, pure and simple, and that the whole record is meant to be his homage to 80’s Hard Rock and the Gothic side of music, and it isn’t meant to save the world or have any great message behind it. It just strikes Dark Juan as a bit vacuous and unfocused.
To summarise then… If you dig the likes of Rob Zombie, Deathstars, Ghost, Lordi, Wednesday 13 and stuff like that, you may well enjoy this album. Dark Juan did, but it was a curiously detached enjoyment, where there was not a surfeit of pleasure. “After Dark” is perfectly acceptable party background music, like Marilyn Manson’s cover versions, but Dark Juan would not seek Infernalizer out on purpose. It is like a crude attempt to fuse Lordi-style choruses with Type O Negative’s innate sex and death and it doesn’t work as well as it could.
It’s shiny black PVC and the polished American Goth aesthetic over any real substance. A fetish model whose online life is all polished latex, sex and raunch who is really a mum of two and enjoys Coronation Street and that shit jungle TV show with the two irritating, eminently kickable Geordie dwarfs mugging endlessly at the camera with a glass of reasonably priced Cabernet Sauvignon. She caters for a group of people she has absolutely zero interest in. Real Goths wear leather and look like they cover themselves in flour. See Fields Of The Nephilim for more details.
I am mildly disappointed.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Il sistema brevettato di classificazione degli schizzi di sangue di Dark Juan, per i nostri meravigliosi lettori italiani) awards Infernalizer 6/10 for a record that fails to delight, apart from a couple of bright spots (being the singles, which flatter to deceive and no mistake).
TRACKLISTING:
01. Season Of The Witch
02. The Dark Passenger
03. What Did You Expect?
04. Moon Of Blood
05. After Dark
06. What We Do In The Shadows
07. Death Wish
08. This Is My Yard
09. Falling In Slow Motion
10. Sky Burial
LINE-UP:
Claudio Ravinale
LINKS:
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