(c) An Autumn For Crippled Children
Wrestling for 15 years An Autumn For Crippled Children new emotional dimensions from elegiac (post) black metal and shoegaze sounds. The Dutch trio strives for the constant expansion of their own sound, strives for depth and shakes the emotional corset of the audience. They recorded the follow-up to “All Fell Silent, Everything Went Quiet” between September 2021 and May 2022, but it took a long time to complete and fine-tune it. Well shows „Closure“ its oversized, menacing claws.
Episodes like “Here Comes Sorrow” illustrate that these ten tracks are by no means standing still on a high level. The grand finale sums up the now well-known mixture of rough Black Metal, post-atmosphere and shoegaze emotional worlds, but the washed-out keyboards and experiments on a rhythmic level are new. And most welcome. “Where Pain Begins” tries something similar, exploding from the starting blocks and destroying everything that is just building up. Dazzling worlds of sound meet raw intensity – a familiar concept, presented extremely powerfully and at the same time oppressively.
In “Culpable”, on the other hand, one thinks briefly of Satyricon, while the trio proceeds in a deliberately stoic manner, only to be thrown off course by the built-in synthetic. Poppy and at the same time uncomfortable melody is one of the most important musical stylistic devices in An Autumn For Crippled Children and is perfected here – uncomfortable, but also engaging. The onset of darkness in the second half is doubly and trebly good. On the other hand, “As The Void” seems to slow down and seems to cushion the capital outburst of anger. Behind it, filigree catchiness surprises, only to be rolled over in the next moment by what might be the roughest guitar walls of the entire album.
The omnipresent contradiction suits An Autumn For Crippled Children very well and inspires their sound more than ever. In other hands the synths would sound cheesy to exhausting, but here they make sense and even whimsy. Overall, “Closure” seems to be a tad more on the Gaze approach, even though the inevitable Black Metal outbursts are doubly and trebly wild as a result. The mix is skilfully worked on, the result is once again beyond any disturbing doubt.
Rating: 8/10
Available from: 04.08.2023
Available through: Prosthetic Records (Cargo Records)
Facebook: www.facebook.com/aafcc2009
Slider-Pic (c) An Autumn For Crippled Children
Category: Magazin, Reviews