(Progressive Metal) Fury'n'Grace - Tales Of The Grotesque And The Arabesque - 2007, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

When you first listen to Tales of The Grotesque and The Arabesque, you fear it's only about another italian heavy metal band. But the album is pretty long (about one hour) and at the end of this first listening, you start to figure out the style is much more original and homogeneous than what the first impression was about to tell you. Actually I would say that the first strange feeling came to me when I tried to listen only to the instrumental structures putting the vocals away for a while. And you find something darker and more extreme behind it. But that makes sense if you look at the background and interests of every musician. In particular in the case of Matteo Carnio, who's at the origin of the band. Indeed Matteo's influences go from early 90's thrash/death metal and grindcore (Slayer, Carcass, Napalm Death, Entombed) to much more experimental compositors of the same period (John Zorn, Naked City). With such eclectic tastes there was something to go on with a very personal music. Of course there was some balance to put into it with the arrival of the other musicians. Christian Grillo's play on bass and the vocals of Gabriele Grilli are more relevant to pure heavy metal to me.

The color of Tales of The Grotesque and The Arabesque is also kind of unique to me in the way that tempos are really slow being compared to today's symphonic heavy metal and also compared to what I'm more used to actually. But it's not about doom metal either. It's just something in between. Eventually this specificity makes this album particularly pleasant and easy to listen. The songs are pretty simple in their structures. Every effort is put to create a very special atmosphere generated by very long tracks (up to 16 minutes!).

People will maybe regret that the solos are very rare in this album but on the other hand I'm not sure it would really fit here. Personally I didn't miss the solos too much with respect to this very heavy and slow music.

As a conclusion we get with Fury N Grace something fundamentally different from their compatriots of Rhapsody [of Fire] for instance. Some occasional Iron Maiden accents are always noticeable but apart from that I can't really distinguish other influences. Fury N Grace used to feature a keyboard player (Alessandro Del Vecchio who is the other initiator of the project along with Matteo Carnio) but I sincerely think there's no need of such a contribution. Even though Tales of The Grotesque and The Arabesque is definitely no heavy metal revolution, Fury N Grace gets over it with honors.

written by Hubert Chapuis

Gabriele Grilli - vocals and keyboards
Matteo Carnio - guitars and keyboards
Christian Grillo - bass
Emiliano "Kiske" Bertossi - drums
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Matteo Giuliani - piano melody on 7
Francesca Morandi - contrabass on 7
Gabriele Ferrario, Angelo Baldari & Massimo "Wenders" Fuoco - Choir Of The Missing Boys Rotting Away on 7