Review by Saxy S for Nero di Marte - Immoto (2020)

The third studio album from Italian progressive/post-metal band Nero di Marte was my first exposure to this group. They have been around since around 2007, but their last album came out in 2014, so it has been quite a layoff since the last full length release and man is this something great.

Let's start off by getting on my soapbox for a second: this is how tonal dissonance is done! I've listened to way too many albums in recent days that follow the philosophy that loud noises, distorted through after effects and compression, and heavy percussion does make for tonally challenging music, but not anything that I would want to listen to again. Nero di Marte seem to get this and use dissonance in the actual instruments! Guitar and vocals tend to take many of the crunchy sounds, but are used effectively throughout these seven tracks. And these songs can get pretty hectic when they want to be. "Sisyphos" and the title track "Immoto" both have some black metal or perhaps technical death metal inspired passages that are prepared with such nuance and they hit like a ton of bricks.

Tonally speaking, this kind of reminds me of a band like Astronoid with its spacey atmosphere, complimented by some heavier sections. Unlike Astronoid, these compositions are not of the pleasant, shoegaze variety. Instead, I heard a fair bit of Fen and their seemingly effortless control of dynamics and pacing. These songs are long and the band uses this to their benefit, by having extended quiet, psychedelic passages to build anticipation before the eighteen wheeler just runs straight into you.

And these compositions are what you would expect from those comparisons. From progressive music, you have complex song structures, odd time signatures, multiple melodic ideas used together to give the songs a creative arch. And from post-metal, the atmospherics that are most common in the wall of sound subsets of sludge and black metal, melodic importance with the guitars and bass independence.

I think we may have found our first true contended for AOTY for 2020. Nero di Marte's Immoto is mixed incredibly well, shows off some solid instrumental efficiency, and the compositions themselves are exceptional. If this brand of progressive metal interests you, you need to hear this. You won't regret it.