### Thunderstorm: As we die alone

#### 31/03/10 || Trauma

I’m almost positive the majority of this world live every day loving something they would otherwise hate vehemently. It could be your girlfriend/wife’s annoying little nuances she may or may not do. For example, let’s say she does this smirk / eyelift / neck tilt everytime she thinks she said something remarkable (which is impossible anyways – T-bone’s sexist personality). If it was anyone else, you would absolutely want to rip their head off, but because she sucks your penis you let it slide, and mark it as one of those things you love about her.

I know I’m not wrong, and my whole point of this is that this band, at least in particular this album, I have that same kind of relationship with. It’s like your perfect girlfriend with all the right moves, curves, skin-color (white with a subtle tan), and brains. But she has one glaring annoyance: her accent. HOOOOLLLYYYYY MOOOOLLLLLYYYY. This is that girlfriend. This album technically is perfect. If you like your sludgy metal with heavy doses of doom but on uppers, I can’t see why you couldn’t get into this. But you have to have fallen in love with it first to get over the horrid singing you will be presented with. Okay, let me retract that a bit. The singing itself is probably okay, his voice has a nice tone and pitch. The problem stems from his atrocious accent. He fails at English x50. Take a look at this:

We die as we dream alone We die to dream And dream to die

But here’s what it actually sounds like:

We die an dweam alone We die to dweam And dweam to dieiiii

It’s glaringly bad when you first hear it and it only gets worse later on. For those of you that are well aware of our fascination with one person named Spartacus, you will no doubt notice similarities at times in pronunciations. It’s kinda funny, actually. On the same token, you actually have to hear this album. There is a charm in the music that ultimately wins you over. At least, that’s what happened in my case. How did it win me over? I must thank Pandora (that popular program that uses some music genome project to give you related music) for confusing this band with something similar to Mustasch, because this is more like Candlemass if we’re going to compare them to a Swedish band. “Hypnowheel of life” was the song I was greeted to, but luckily for me it was hard to hear the singing in my truck’s stereo system and I got to appreciate the tune. There are some gem tunes in here, like “Hawking radiation”, “We die as we dream [alone]”, the aforementioned “Hypno…”, “S.l.o.w. (what a fucken perfect doom song title)” and one absolutely surprising short one in the form of “I wait”. It comes out of nowhere and I like it’s more somber feel. Kinda beautiful, actually. The fucken singing even sounds so completely normal here, too. It gives me some familiar vibes, but I just can’t exactly place where the vibes originate from.

The guitars sound real good here, as does the bass and drums. Musically this album does nothing wrong, with hook-laden riffs and some extended sludgy passages. You know, the more I think about how great this shit is, the more I resent the fact that I have to actually let you know about the vocals. One last thing forbids me from sparing them the humiliation, and that is the cover of “Voodoo chile (slight return)”. He gets the lyrics so wrong it’s comical, and not in a good way. It’s bad enough I’m docking a whole point off the score (it kinda doesn’t fit the album, anyways). If you want, forget I said anything. This album kicks ass minus the cover song.

- Information
- Released: 2007
- Label: Dragonheart Records
- Website: www.thunderstorm-doom.com
- Band
- Fabio “Thunder” Bellan: vocals, guitar
- Omar Roncalli: bass
- Attilio Coldani: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Hawking radiation
- 02. Death rides on the highway
- 03. We die as we dream (alone)
- 04. I wait
- 05. Hypnowheel of life
- 06. I
- 07. S.l.o.w.
- 08. Preacher’s dream
- 09. The mad monk
- 10. Voodoo chile (slight return)