BEDEMON - Symphony of Shadows

Symphony of Shadows (2012) is a zombie album! It belongs to a band that was born dead – a collaboration between several former/future members of Pentagram (itself a ghost band), dating around the early 70s – it contains songs written during the last 40 years and is released 10 years after the death of guitarist Randy Palmer, its main song writer.

So, what do we have here? I think the best description comes from the devastating documentary on human failure, dedicated to Bobby Liebling and his band, Pentagram, titled “Last Days Here” (2011); even though it refers to Pentagram, the quote fits perfectly for Bedemon: listening to these songs is like bringing back to life that prehistoric man that was found in ’91, who had been frozen in a glacier in the Alps for more than 3,000 years.

Even though the songs were assembled and recorded during the last 10 or 15 years, their blueprints date quite a long time before. We have a few pieces of classic doom, such as Lord of Desolation, Son of Darkness and The Plague; we have the Godless – Hopeless pair, two long songs, unexpectedly heavy and complex (Hopeless could have served as a closing for the album with its drawn-out final improvisation) and then we have Eternally Unhuman, hypnotically repeating “Nothing will ever be the same”, perhaps a reference to the death of its creator, Randy Palmer. What I find myself most attracted to are the rather faster songs that have that something connecting them to the 70s. A riff, a chorus (most of the times cheesy by current standards) will give out that vintage air and you realize in amazement, like Indiana Jones, that before you lies a true artefact: Saviour, D.E.D and Kill You Now.

If you can find the compilation Child of Darkness (2005), the circle closes and you have so far what all Bedemon members, dead or alive, could have released. I say so far, because drummer Geof O'Keefe, a founding member of Pentagram and Bedemon, does not rule out a tour or some new songs, assembled from demos left behind by Randy Palmer.

Symphony of Shadows is clearly an album for archaeologists, but also for anyone who is interested how America’s answered to Black Sabbath could have sounded in its time.

Gedi Nota: 9