Album Review: Forgotten Winter - Lucífugo
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Sparkle in the wan dawn; pale velvet glove pulled taut about the cold earth asleep below. All quiet all cold. Fresh flakes flit unhurried from the heavens. Little frosted cherub feathers, come that I shall not mourn alone. The braver flakes rest gentle on bowed shoulder, touch of angels. Fly on ye faithful friends of Christ – I seek no salvation here. I need more from this place than it can yield. Sepulchre white, ivory waste, pure and unbroken miles around, floor merging with fog to build one great blank shroud about me, and the boy buried beneath. Somewhere above wheels a raven, lone dark fleck afloat amidst the pallor, harsh call lonely and piercing, smothered quickly by silence.
Symphonic Atmoblack. Songs less written than composed, comprised less of riffs than “Ostinatos” and “movements”. Forgotten Winter’s particular brand is of a grand, regal line, bombastic to a surety but sticking mostly to a mid-paced, more reserved take on the genre. Which shouldn’t be taken to imply simplicity; this is a deeply complex album, with a tonne of moving parts intersecting and recombining at any one moment. A sumptuous array of strings, keys, vocal styles and percussion await you, composed for the most part masterfully (more on that later). It’s a multifaceted release in terms of mood too, by turns joyful and uplifting (“Lucifuga Vila”) and then downcast, sombre (“Sentinela na Masmorra”). It’s a slow burn; crescendos build bit by bit to finally bloom into moments of spectacular grandeur. “Ascralt” in particular is superlative at this, it’s tragic vistas of peaks and valleys closing the album out with an epic yet maudlin dirge, as sad as it is swelling and righteous. Songs this expansive and dense require a certain length but all told the album clocks in at a civilised 46 minutes – enough for the scope of it’s ideas to properly unfurl, not so much that accusations of bloat find much foothold. So we’re all good then? Nothing negative to speak of, no whisper of discontent? Weeeell...
A bad craftsman blames his tools; yet if Michaelangelo had only a rubber chicken and a pile of cow shit with which to sculpt “David” then I can’t imagine anyone being too impressed. Consider “Moonlight Sonata”; one of the most stately yet morose pieces in Mozart's repertoire. Now imagine he'd only a kazoo at hand when he’d composed it. Hyperbolic? Certainly. Yet the main problem i have with Lucifugo is it’s choice of instrumentation. The music cries out for the evocative muscularity of a full orchestra, and fair enough that would likely be beyond whatever I might be entitled to presume Forgotten Winter’s budget to have been, yet... from the second that first synth Piccolo farted at me in
the opener “Lucifuga Vila”, I had to grit my teeth a little. There is a gorgeous album in here in compositional terms, rich and majestic, but burnished nonetheless by how inauthentic and computerised some of it sounds. If you’ve played any number of PC classics, say Ultima or one of the early Elder Scrolls titles like Arena or Daggerfall, you’ll feel at home with the parity between Lucifugo and the MIDI soundtracks from those games. And what if that’s where these fantastical themes and motifs I’m picking up come from? Am I simply being wooed by the musical trappings of old school CRPG soundtracks? It’s not always -or even most of the time, if I’m honest - quite so distracting, but songs like “Baile Dos Cadaveres”, with it’s garish, blaring horns really does suffer for it (matters aren’t helped when what I swear on the souls of my ancestors is the exact harmonica sound from Blue’s “All Rise” comes in).
What we have here, then, is a glorious clutch of compositions marred occasionally, if hardly fatally, by unfortunate choices in synth orchestration. Out there in some variant reality exists a version of Lucifugo with the full might of a professional orchestra in support; pine as I might for that hypothetical release I cannot deny the power of what exists with us here, on our own ignoble plane of existence. Lucifugo is excellent, frustrating though it might be from time to time. If you enjoy CRPGs – particularly of the 90’s variety – you couldn’t ask for a better soundtrack.
