Review: Gravestone “Proud To Be Dead”

Gravestone “Proud To Be Dead”
Sliptrick records

Here we have another band which came back from world of dead. This band which comes from capital of Italy was born in 1991 to die in 1994 after releasing of EP (in my opinion it was just a demo released on CD) “Symphony of Pain”. They were in non-existence next nine years. But they were patient and created new songs another three years. Well, that’s very possible that process of creating the music didn’t take so long time. But they had to find somebody who would like to release what they created. Anyway, finally on February 24^th of this year it came out. Well, this is only in digital version. But as we say in Poland: if you don’t have what you like then you like what you have.

“Proud to Be Dead” contains five (on “Symphony of Pain” there were six, with the first one as intro) songs of generally Death Metal. But it’s surely not what the most of you directly connote with these two so very beautiful for our ears words. Guys use adjective ‘progressive’ to describe more completely their music. And indeed, that’s often broken and technical playing as well. Riffs change quite often here and even if they have element of melody it’s characteristically broken. And who cares that this melody is mostly sick one and rather hard to recognize? In my opinion it adds to this music something unique. Of course we can listen to some solos, too – sometimes also a little “strange”. Marco makes really good job, I think.

Fabio’s drumming is also various and broken. Of course from its nature it just can’t be as broken as guitar parts (it could be too much for so called average Metal listener). But we have some passages, changes of tempo and stuff like that. These changes are mostly quite subtle and it’s any some lickety-split gallop, but there’s energy and even if you’d listen only to drums’ track you’d surely hear that it’s taken from some Metal band. Bass follows drums and it means that Gianluca plays technically as well. Keyboards which Massimiliano plays, give to this music added value for sure. These melodies are also a little sick, but at least in my opinion that’s only better! Well, it becomes some tradition that as last one I almost always describe vocal. I don’t do it especially, anyway. I like what Stefano does. That’s growling, but various and a little untypical for Death Metal. This is screamer and sometimes I notice here something more connoted with Black Metal – this more melodic one.  There’re also short fragments of speaking, but I suppose that it’s duty of Fabio.

In general it’s not as easy as pie to classify the music of Italians. As I said in the beginning, that’s surely Death Metal generally. But there’re influences of other styles here as well. Maybe the best noticeable it’s in “Eyes Without Sight“. I don’t want or even try to persuade you that there weren’t and still isn’t bands which play(-ed) like that! They were, are and surely will always be.  The “problem” is only that there never were them as many as these which played “normal” Death Metal. To sum up, this is band for rather open-minded fans, first of all of Death Metal, but not only.