Gaerea - Limbo
Limbo is a journey into nothingness, darkness and silence, into the void. It is a place where vanity ceases to exist, where the celestial sky has guided Gaerea. The Portuguese band are a mysterious group of five masked and unknown colours, cold and vacant. Limbo is their second full length, arriving two years after the promising debut Unsettling Whispers, and an earlier self titled EP that received warm praise.
Unsettling Whispers is a diverse release, yet deployed common black metal cliches, or predictable moments of build, expand, explode and retract, while still incorporating an interesting flavour of hardcore. Unsettling Whispers possesses more restraint than Limbo, and sounds more black and white; but don’t confuse that with a lack of craft or shading, because the level of songwriting has improved on Limbo, as it should. As a species, we should improve, it should be natural to reserve the word ‘decline’ for empires, not for the human race.
Limbo is a moving entity of six tracks centred in a dense hell, or the meeting point between heaven and hell, where faces rot and the skin melts, and bodies moan, some grieve, some scream and others fall. And the vocals sound like they are recorded then and there, at the pit, summoning those that remain in limbo, telling their stories, explaining the narrative of pathetic and forgotten souls. It is not crucial to pick apart tracks, and attempt to decipher influences, stylistic nuance, drum patterns or tremolo picking. What you have to experience on Limbo is just over 50 minutes of catharsis, emotion, passion and gripping energy.
The lyrics on Limbo paint an intriguing reality of a journey into the abyss, perhaps the deepest coma. The writing is clever, it moves with vision, confidence and with plenty of colourful disdain that mirrors the often tortured vocal style, moving beyond the tropes of Black Metal, and deeper into a cathartic pocket of Hardcore. Limbo is vital, it places you in a cold and bleak environment, but the album is vigorous, it sounds like the band are playing it for the last time ever, with the passion of their first. Limbo is well worth the time for listeners that demand an experience or a journey from an album, those that revel in great Black Metal with genre pushing capabilities (Death, Hardcore and Sludge), and those that are not afraid to close their eyes, breathe, despise and start over again.
To Ain (11:15)
Null (6:01)
Glare (7:16)
Conspiranoia (9:15)
Urge (4:50)
6. Mare (13:11)
