Band:	The Undergrave Experience
Album:	Macabre - Il Richiamo Delle Ombre
Style:	Funeral doom metal
Release date:	November 02, 2010
A review by:	BitterCOld

01. Mater Mortalis Tenebrarum
02. Zombie Graveyard Horizon (Ballata Mortale)

Italians in metal seem to have a propensity to go overboard. There is a certain band out there for whom the term "power metal" wasn't enough, so they hired famous actors to read spoken narratives and interludes and dubbed themselves the unfortunate title "Hollywood Metal." The Undergrave Experience are their evil twin, their vile doppelganger. Rhapsody in Hellfire, if you will.

Rather than go all "Quattro Formaggi" and dumping enough dairy into the mix to give lactose-intolerant listeners a fatal reaction, they opted for the more stripped down styling of horror movies. Specifically, classic Italian horror movies of years past... i.e. Dario Argento stuff.

Yes, I find it terribly amusing that two weeks and three reviews or so I made a remark about a band sounding as if they were trying to score a horror flick when I get an album that actually is an intentional marriage of a metal release and a horror movie score.

At their base, The Undergrave Experience are a typical funeral doom metal band. Y'all know what that means by now. Slooooooooow, heavily distorted riffs with accompanying drum beats so far between one another you can time them on a sun dial, melodic yet mournful leads, and subsonic growled vocals that sound more like something that should be playing in one of those "we like the cars, the cars that go boom" low-riding, drum-n-bass blaring trucks that set off all car alarms in the postal code with each beat rather than what should be coming through your puny, mortal speakers. Two songs, each nearly as long as a full grindcore release... and with 1/100000th the beats.

The horror movie marriage means lots of piano based interludes... they hammer a couple of the really low keys on the far left to set a somber mode, then a few higher notes on the far right side to creep you out. Toss in some synths. These passages go on long enough for half of the band to set down their instruments, go down a bottle of grappa, stagger back and resume playing.

And like their aforementioned counterparts, they even have spoken bits in this. Fortunately they eschewed aging, acting Britons (or worse, some dude with a Sylvester The Cat-esque speech impediment) to babble on about rocks and trees. Instead they have what basically sounds like some creepy prophecy, or even exorcism - the expelling demons sort, not the treadmill kind.

There are spots where perhaps the non-\m/ goes on for an aggravatingly long time, but then again, it is funeral doom and the time table for anything remotely bombastic or explosive is already slowed down to the speed of boredom. Either you dig it and endure it, or you just dump the tunes in your recycle bin.

I found it a bit of a grower, I liked it at first, and more so as I gave it repeated listens. Even then it has largely been background music. I listen while reading, typing away furiously at my pc, or while passing out after consuming enough grappa to put me in my undergrave.