CD review GAEREA ‘Limbo’

After Portuguese Gaerea premiered in 2018 with ‘Unsetting Whipsers’ the band received a lot of positive feedback, which has been the springboard for the quintet to further evolve. What certainly helped guys from Oporto was inking a deal with Season Of Mist. With the support of the new label the guys started to work on their next strike, which is certainly a fulminant one.

‘Limbo’ is intense and dark. It’s amazing with what kind of forcefulness the guys hammer out songs that are dark and brutal. And not only that the songs are wrapped in a mood of wistfulness, they are also pitch black with fragile and melodic moments, being the well-chosen musical counter-weight. Gaerea roll all this out with the first track on ‘Limbo’.

‘To Ain’ is a track that units Post-Metal, Black Metal and a portion of gloom that all covers your soul right-away. With more than 11 minutes the opener is not only a song, it’s a statement right at the beginning of a 51 minutes journey through an emotional abyss.

With ‘Null’ things don’t get calmer. It’s a next raging chapter that shows musical skills and touches by the extremely intense vocals. The vehemence and density the guys go to work is striking. None of the six tracks on the album sounds like a compromise and conformity is for sure not what the guys are aiming for, manifested in songs like the straight-foward hitting ‘Urge’. What ‘Urge’ also includes is a groove that breaks the high pace along the way and in my opinion adds extra mercilessness to the really cool album.

As the opener, also the closer is an extra long statement, this time rounding-off ‘Limbo’. ‘Mare’ is a tight track that includes bigger sound constructs, thinking of the calmer and slower middle-section that feels like an oppressive calm before the thundering musical storm takes over again.

Gaerea release with ‘Limbo’ an excellent new longplayer. The quintet makes a big step forward with their sophomore album and it doesn’t need a deeper look into the blackened crystal ball to predict that we will hear more from Gaerea over the coming years.