Intaglio  (Solitude Productions)

 This is the self-titled debut album from the Russian funeral doomsters Intaglio. They play a correctly executed funeral doom, with everything you can expect from a band of this genre: long and really slow tempo songs, with an atmosphere of coldness and deep sadness. The album consist of 3 songs, plus an excellent and full of sorrow intro (with a guitar solo from the additional musician Pavel Peristy), with beautiful clean guitar  melodies. The album has a very good sound production, and a great design that fits perfectly with the atmosphere of the music, really nice black & white photography. The compositions are at a very good level (all at the same level, I can’t choose a favourite track), good vocals (growls deep enough) good clean guitar parts mixed with the simple heavy riffing, with no keyboards at all, and the “exotic” fact that all the songs are sung in Russian. A very good debut album from this two men band (Evgeny Seamen: music, guitars, bass and programming; Maksim Mazin: texts and vocals), but don’t expect surprises here, just funeral doom in it’s purest form. If you are a funeral doom fan (as myself) you’ll enjoy this album, despite the fact is not something remarkable, but very well done. (A.R.)