Album review : ALTERIUM – Of War And Flames

AFM Records [Release date : 08.03.24]

Alterium is a new Italian Symphonic Metal quintet led by Nicoletta Rosellini (ex. Kalidia), a talented artist who juggles several media related careers. She also fronts Goth Metal band, Walk In The Darkness.

Of War And Flames is the band’s debut album.

This is a tight, tight outfit. Even when aiming for that epic sweep, taking the music from zero to heroic heights in the course of four minutes – as with ‘Firebringer’ and ‘Crossroads’ – they don’t put a foot wrong.

Producer, Lars (Freedom Call) Rettkowitz has the obsessive’s eye for fine textural detail. He makes sure the arrangements don’t shift too far from the band’s lush, widescreen style of Symphonic Metal, mainlining us into a world of romantic imagery with ‘Crystalline’, and the escalating operatic rush of ‘Heroine Of The Sea’.

The advance guard – three trailer tracks – released progressively over the last 3 months, were exciting blasts of tuneful symphonic metal that had already marked out the band as a talent to watch.

The first, ‘Drag Me To Hell’ skilfully parades two intertwining melodies in among the breathless, hi speed bpms. It’s the album’s poster boy, able and agile, neatly bypassing the generic stuff that passes for Symphonic Metal nowadays.

‘Of War And Flames’ the track, cranks into sonic overdrive quickly, cresting an intro of powerful choral work and classy piano/strings interplay, rising to a dark and brooding chorus. It’s the kind of impassioned stuff that demands a big canvas, and it gets one.

Sometimes in this genre, when what you expect are sharp edges, overblown arrangements and martial beats, what you get is tastefully tailored symphonic metal arrangements and a singer who knows how to modulate.

That’s clearly the case with ‘Sirens Call’ and ‘Shadowsong’. Both are sympathetically orchestrated love songs, classy and classic. Each with imaginative arrangements and lilting, swiftly moving melodies, revealing a vulnerabity in Rosellini’s vocals that spin a melancholy lyric into something substantial and believable. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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