This Eternal Decay
Spettro
SwissDarkNights
The various members of Italian darkwave act This Eternal Decay all have musical pedigrees stretching back well before the band’s formation in 2018 and the more or less contemporaneous surge in interest in darkwave. Coming from tenures in Spiral69, Date At Midnight, and even Spiritual Front, they’d all have had plenty of time to hone their chops even if new LP Spettro wasn’t This Eternal Decay’s fifth LP in seven years. That record continues their run of releases in a wide-ranging but still familiar continental darkwave style.
While atmosphere and mood are This Eternal Decay’s fortes, they have more than enough methods at hand for conjuring it. The dreamy guitars and plinking melodies of “Red Orchid” are nicely offset by the compressed drones and pads which however throughout, while the deft guitar work on “A Matter Of Lies” draws the line between second wave goth and more recent and sleek post-punk. Additionally, the snap and immediacy of the leads and beats on most of the Spettro keeps things from ever getting too ponderous or insular, even at its most gloomy.
Speaking of beats, there’s maybe a bit more in the way of quantized, dancefloor-friendly programming on Spettro than on previous records, but even when it’s used to add a bit of punch to the record it’s generally complemented by dour, mopey guitar (“Cold Fear”) or distortion and chiming synthpop-styled leads (“Rise & Fall”). As with the actual genres and eras This Eternal Decay are drawing upon, there’s a real sense of taste and balance throughout.
For all of that polish and consideration, few of the tracks on Spettro rise beyond the de facto appeal of these various blends of darkwave executed competently in terms of composition or memorability (a possible trade-off of the band’s relentless release schedule), but then again none of them really fall below that median line, either. The variety and brevity of the record overall is part of its charm, and even if it never moves the needle to a significant degree it still uses it to trace some enjoyable passages.
