AMEDERIA – Unheard Prayers

For some reason, it has been a while since the last time I discovered a new band in the gothic/doom scene, although this genre has accompanied me for a really long time through the usual names and some lesser known ones. This time I had the chance to "turn back time" for a moment thanks to the Russian act Amederia, that has actually been around for almost ten years and managed to release a quite successful album in 2008, "Sometimes We Have Wings". Six difficult years have passed, and we can finally listen to them again with a mature release — the first published through the genre-specialist Solitude Productions — that brought me back to the years when this sound occupied most of my listens.

Speaking of the album, "Unheard Prayers" opens with the beautiful instrumental piano piece "Eden", that takes us to the entrance of a world that we know all too well, that bears a striking resemblance to the real one. The doubt, or even the certainty, that our hopes and prayers will remain unheard as highlighted by the title, is everywhere. Visually and musically, we are comfortably seated in the gothic/doom canon, including a carillon that paves the way for the reflections of "Loneliness In Heaven". The never too abused double vocals, between Damir Galeev's growl and Gulnaz Bagirova's clean, is our guide through "Unheard Prayers".

Naturally, there is some room for the ballad "The Dance Of Two Swans", almost completely executed with piano and clean vocals, and the outro "Sunset" frames the hour-long reflection of the band from Tatarstan. Generally speaking, the tracks don't feel excessively long despite their length, the atmosphere and the overall result are coherent and well-crafted.

This is not an album that will reinvent a genre that has been living on its past for quite a while now, but we can certainly say that this is a solid work that will appeal to fans of Draconian, Saturnus, and so on.