Amia Venera Landscape - The Long Procession Review

This year has been great for metal music (and music in general, it seems), but before anyone starts compiling their ‘best of 2010’ list there is another album that must be heard. The Long Procession is the debut album by Italian sextet Amia Venera Landscape and it is absolutely ferocious throughout most of its sixty-six minute run-time. Imagine, if you will, the chaotic post-hardcore riffs of Define the Great Line-era Underoath combined with the expansive peaks and valleys of a latter-day Isis track, add a bit of math metal to the mix, and finally push up the levels of intensity as well as the ambient atmospheres and you’ll have a basic idea of what to expect. The problem is that until you actually receive the frenzied bludgeoning that this album delivers, you’re still probably not even close to knowing what is actually on The Long Procession.

Almost every aspect of this album is huge and overwhelming. The vocalist’s massive growl/scream dominates over almost every track and is delivered with a conviction that is rarely matched. As if that isn’t enough, most of the songs simply move from one giant climactic set of riffs and notes to the next with only the occasional quiet reprieve. Taking things one step further, the entire collection flows from one track to the next causing the album to feel like one massive sledgehammer of a song. The epic feel doesn’t end there, though. The songs have a way of building to a point where it seems as though they couldn’t get any more powerful, and it’s usually at that instance that they lurch forward one final time to an entirely new dynamic level. Whether it is the huge closing of “Empire” that somehow manages to surpass the first four minutes of unrelenting chaos or the giant riff that comes from out of nowhere on “A New Aurora,” they always seem to find a way to step up the power. Even the portions that include clean singing and melodic passages can’t suitably be called melodious because the aggression is constantly maintained by their beast of a drummer. Quite simply, if the drummer is on the track he is beating the *** out of his kit with focused hostility....full text Amia Venera Landscape is a sextet combining nervy post hardcore riffs with wide instrumental suites. They born in 2007 with a six-pieces lineup, and immediately start gaining their own space within the Italian alternative scene, sharing the stage with bands such as The Dillinger Escape Plan, Underoath, Coalesce, Russian Circles, A Storm Of Light, These Arms Are Snakes, Agnostic Front, Knut, Darkest Hour, Torche, Gwen Stacy, Kylesa and many others. In 2008 they released their debut EP ,that allows them to play in the main Italian rock clubs. In December 4th 2010 they released their first full length album, ‘The Long Procession’, and they’re going to release a brand new video. An album raw and hardcore that prooves and promotes a heavy profile with melodic branches and strange atmospheres that mixed excellent with post-hardcore ideas and as I said last year A sludgy post-hardcore from an Italian band. Brutal vocals rotate with clean and give to the atmosphere an alternative color. This album is fresh and really modern. It sounds like a new approach of hardcore. In some parts atmospheric scapes and ambient passages gives to the release a more easy listening approach. The band tries to give to their metal a more Neurosis-like style and their style is a bit closer to technical and math metal styles than raw hardcore metal. The album is surely interesting and a step forward from their previous EP release. They worth it to be around the most evolutionary bands in Italy and they do play their music quite well....full text