PRAETERNATURAL

This band produced some quite dark albums so far. Each of them could hardly be described as a good album and their atmosphere do share a lot with black magic themes, religion and related subjects.

I'm not too much into this to tell the truth. While I could endorse the gimmick about "Black Widow" (who were actually a good heavy prog band with no relation with black magic), I was not really too enthusiast about "Antonius Rex". I quite liked the debut album from "Jacula" because this held quite adventurous music for the era (1969), but their next emulation never could motivated myself on the same level.

The music featured on this work could have been used for a third tier scary movie, but to listen to this album as a pure musical experience is rather difficult and little rewarding IMHHO. If it would have been written in the early seventies, I would have said that it was quite avant-garde but in the early eighties, this was not any longer the case. Just boring, I'm afraid.

Some awful "dance" beats are even to be heard during the title track. Needless to say that the "press next" key is more than encouraged. Gosh! What an awful piece of music. One of the most digestible song (as long as no "vocal" enters the scene) is by far "Capturing Universe". Same mood as usual (mostly), but this time a great guitar solo is shining and upgrades the level of this track. To be honest, even without this good part, this song is above average on this " Praeternatural".

I can't rate this album with more than two stars. It holds too many poor tracks to be considered as a good album. Quite hermetic and weird (as most of their albums actually). One can even get the whole of "Jacula" and "Antonius Rex" biography during the closing "Vox Populi". Some sort of self indulgence I guess.