Laetitia In Holocaust – Fanciulli D’Occidente
Laetitia In Holocaust – Fanciulli D’Occidente
Released by Dusktone
Release Date: 31/05/24
Running Time: 36:26
Review by Dark Juan
7/10
Good afternoon, dear friends. I am Dark Juan and I have had coffee. Coffee makes me do wonderful things like write this, my third record review of the day and it is only 14:55. I am wired and staring, my fingers flying over the keyboard and ideas boiling from behind my eyes for stories, as I have a cinematic imagination when I am listening to music and it sets off ideas that develop themselves, synapses firing all over the fucking shop. Then, when the coffee wears off, my memory goes with it. How many stories have died that way? How many of them never got to be born because the tawdriness of having to earn coin got in the way? How many stories never saw the light of day because something happened that needed to be attended to?
How fleeting the power of imagination is. What a luxury it must be to be able to not have to work and to be able to be seated in front of a mechanism to record your stories, and have the time to hone and polish them, even if you aren’t going to publish them and you write for pleasure alone. I wish I had the time. Instead, I shoehorn thousand word plus record reviews in between assignments for my NVQ 5 and the frankly ridiculous amount of hours I am working because there is yet another staffing crisis at work. We hadn’t even got over the last one yet. And I do this because I love the music. I love Metal in all its forms, from the most boneheaded Glam to the most abstruse Prog and everything in between. Today, Dark Juan is listening to Laetitia In Holocaust, from Modena in Italy, a place normally associated with the posh red Fiats that are Ferraris, and they play avantgarde Black Metal.
DISCLAIMER: A bunch of knobheads on Threads had a go at Laetitia In Holocaust because of the name of the band and immediately labelled them a Fascist band because they are Italian and because their name has the word “Holocaust” in it. Obviously, Dark Juan defended the honour of LIH because he was arguing from a position of knowledge because Dark Juan does fucking research before he writes, and has found an interview with vocalist Stefano with this quote I wish to bring to everyone’s attention, to put this question to bed once and for all:
“The moniker means “happiness in apocalypse,” and there’s no bond with the Nazi interpretation of the term “holocaust.” LIH was born as manifestation of a destructive and religious sphere. We’re not shitty atheist, Satanist, Christian or other similar ugly followers of ugly beliefs. We enjoy a pulse towards transcendence and violence, pandemonium and pity. LIH means the happiness in a sad global disappearance.”
That fucking takes care of that. Especially for the fucking Ameerican who just declared that Dark Juan was a Fascist, when it is well known that Dark Juan is virulently and aggressively anti-Fascist and is vociferously so. Dark Juan and Ever-Metal.com will never give any Fascist or National Socialist band a single inch of text, ever.
Now, Dark Juan always strikes a note of caution when a Black Metal band describes themselves as avantgarde, because the majority of the time in Dark Juan’s experience, avantgarde means barely able to play a fucking note and the production of the record was paid for by giving blowjobs to the engineer. Especially when it comes to Black Metal. Nevertheless, Dark Juan has not yet found a depth he isn’t willing to sink to for the sake of a cheap laugh or for the love of music, so he has cranked the Platter of Splatter™ into life and lobbed the fifth album from Laetitia In Holocaust upon it.
Crikey.
Well, this is a lesson in making sure you have had an aural palate cleanser before reviewing and no mistake. I had listened to Kittie’s new album before listening to LIH and the difference in styles and production quality smacked me right between the eyes and rendered LIH unlistenable at that moment, so I went and had a nice cup of tea (I am English, after all, and it is the cure for all known and unknown ills) and a sit down before returning to the Platter of Splatter™ and reactivating it.
I am very glad I did because had I gone with the initial thought that I had about the production I would have done Laetitia In Holocaust a serious disservice as the production on “Fanciulli D’Occidente” sounded like it had been completed on a BBC Micro 32k computer after the richness of the sound of Canada’s finest female four-piece. The break from listening enabled me to understand that LIH have a particular metier and that waspish, treble-heavy sound is what works for Black Metal, avantgarde or not. It is that quality that gives Black Metal the arctic, cold, gale-force wind feel that makes it such an evocative genre of music, even if a proportion of the fanbase for it is either racist and fucking stupid. And they all like playing dress-up.
The album opens with ‘Celestial And Buried’ and it is a dangerous and pointy weapon of a song, although on the intro the fretless bass of Nicola D. A. has some very unusual harmonics that mar the enjoyment of it somewhat – it can be somewhat overpowering, especially over the serrated, razorwire guitar work of Stefano G. This happens several times over the runtime of the record, especially at the end of ‘Earth As A Furnace’.
However, I am enjoying the fuck out of this album, gripes aside. It has that unhinged quality of early Black Metal with a strong progressive (with a small ‘p’) element that lurches uncomfortably close to Gothic at times – the mournful cello-like tones on ‘Murmurs Of Faith’ and the minor key it is played in being prime exemplars of this – however the interplay between bass and guitar on this song is absolutely fucking brilliant. It is actually really nice to hear a band doing something a bit different with Black Metal than either turning it into a parody (“Death Cult Armageddon” anyone?) of itself or twisting it so completely out of shape that it becomes something totally different. See Cradle Of Filth and hear their transformation from actual avantgarde Black Metal band into extreme Gothic cabaret…
In conclusion, then, this is a record of promise that falls just short. The bass is too overpowering in places and the arrangements sometimes a little bit jarring. However, looked at as a whole, it is a rich tapestry of sound that beguiles as much as it bludgeons, an icy romanticism lurking just beneath the savagery of Arctic winds and snow-covered forests filled with fanged and hungry predators. The arrangements of the music are inventive and interesting in the main and the use of fretless bass offers a liquid, flowing bottom end to the band that is not heard often in this level of extreme music.
A niche choice, to be sure, but if you are a fan of early Ved Buens Ende you are likely to enjoy Laetitia In Holocaust, but they are very much an acquired taste in my opinion.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Il sistema brevettato di classificazione degli schizzi di sangue di Dark Juan saluta i miei amici e lettori italiani! Spero che siate tutti felici, in salute e realmente interessati all’idiozia che scrivo, mascherata da recensioni di dischi…) awards Laetitia In Holocaust 7/10.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Celestial And Buried
02. Earth As A Furnace
03. Murmurs Of Faith
04. Jvlivs Caesar Germanicvs
05. Devotio
06. A Dancestep Of Fat
07. From Plowshares To Swords
LINE-UP:
Stefano G. – Vocals, guitars
Nicola D. A. – Fretless bass
Marcello M. – Drums
LINKS: