Seeing only six tracks on the back of this Italian unit's disc, I figured it was an EP. Wrong! Try more than 40 minutes of bleak atmospheres and plodding rhythms in the vein of a stripped down Neurosis or something. There aren't that many bells and whistles. Occasionally there will be some well handled synths or subtle ambient textures, but it's really just guitar, drums, bass, and vocals. And hell, most of the vocals are very softly delivered, almost sung in a whisper, while most of the tracks revolve around repetitious instrumentation that builds and sways back and forth from flowing clean melodies to hard hitting distorted rhythms (with a major emphasis on the calm and sinister clean passages). "Livings' Dreams Are Deads' Lives" runs nearly six minutes without percussion, just acoustic guitars, very faint ambient keyboards, and almost inaudibly lulled singing. The instrumental "A Man Escaped" uses dryer clean guitars bordering on an emo style, with lots of frantic drum fills really thickening up the space; while "Toward the Crimson Eye" takes a similar approach layering acoustic guitars in against numerous samples, some of which are from slightly generic titles such as "Taxi Driver" or "Apocalypse Now" - distracting from an otherwise excellent piece of droning, hypnotic instrumentation. Closer "I Can Be the Chaos, They Can Be the Structure" is still based around clean guitars and soft vocals, but it's far "heavier" atmospherically, definitely the most intense track herein, eventually using more driving distorted guitars than any other piece. I like the recording, too. All they need to do is make the distortion thicker and more in your face. Everything else sounds awesome. I'd turn the vocals up a little, but the drums are perfect, the clean guitars and experimental textures are great, etc. The layout is stripped down but pretty cool, with some abstract high contrast artwork and a minimal color scheme, as well as numerous band photos and other random images in the center spread. The only text really appears under the tray, and no lyrics are included. This is an interesting disc. Not overtly original per se, but something a little different. In a way if they used distortion more often it would make them less unique, but at the same time I think it would make them better, as there aren't quite enough dynamics here. This is worth checking out, though. definitely an experiment in what constitutes "heaviness".
7/10