Review: A TRAVÉS DEL MANTO – Dance of Eternal Shadows

Year: 2024
Label: Swiss Dark Nights
Rating: 8 / 10

This album was recommended to me by Vaiug, who also loves post-punk music very much. The band A TRAVÉS DEL MANTO from the beautiful country of Chile turned out to be one of the most original that I've heard in the last year. Perhaps some of you remember the one-time project CURSED MOON, the one that combined extreme metal with post-punk, deathrock ad so on. In 2017, I predicted that such music would soon become a trend, but I was wrong. Post-punk with all its offshoots has become a trend, and its mixture with metal has remained an exotic form of music, accepted by only a few listeners.

The Chileans of A TRAVÉS DEL MANTO took a much more refined and versatile approach to this matter. If CURSED MOON was actually metal played in post-punk style, then the opposite is true here. You can call it FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM with metallic flavor (the main vocalist, of course, also wears a hat!), but in a good way and style, not like in Carl McCoy's horrible project THE NEFILIM. The music here has a flow and metamorphs all the time, constantly exploring various facets of the post-punk sound. Fortunately, it is also intense. Fiery Chileans don't have enough patience and pretentiousness to immerse themselves in 6-8 minutes of very important acoustic noise ambient stuff. The dance of eternal shadows never stops.

Interestingly, the album doesn't seem to have any keyboards at all. All the effects are created through the guitars, and the deep reverb perfectly replaces the synthesizer backing. In general, everything is used to the fullest here. It seems that each guitarist and bassist does not play one instrument, but several at the same time, tuned in completely different ways. The vocalist, of course, has only one voice, so he is assisted by guest singers. Together with the heavy and booming sound, all this gives an album full of revelations, in which almost half of the songs can be called hits: pay attention to “Xmal Funeral”, “Night Rider”, “Candles Burning Black” (!!!), “Captured by the Shadows” and “A Través del Manto”.