Extravaganza are a Lithuanian post-black metal band and this is their debut album.
Extravaganza offer up 70 minutes of post-black metal on their debut album, weaving depressive and atmospheric elements into their music.
The depressive black metal style infects everything here, ensuring that almost everything the band do is touched by it in some way or other. Extravaganza don’t play the pure depressive style, however, but it’s certainly a prime influence.
The music is dark and filled with misery, taking lonesome blackened guitars and feeding them a steady diet of loss and woe for months on end to achieve their final, tragic state.
Post-metal melodies are wedded to depressive ones, which can sometimes result in a curious mix of the upbeat and downbeat. These melodies are quite prominent and central to the music in some places, whereas in others they are peripheral and act merely in a support capacity.
Atmosphere is used effectively across the album, with some of the more atmospheric and moody passages numbering among my favourite parts of the songs.
The vocalist has a wide range, performing everything form high-pitched screams to deep deathgrowls. Like the music, his voice is infected with the depressive style, but also like the music, this is not completely the case; probably 60-70% of his performance falls into this category, with the remainder consisting of more traditional deliveries.
Priepuoliai is lengthy, but enjoyable, in a bleak, depressive way. However, as this album is also shot through with resplendent post-metal elements, there’s more of mix of darkness and light on this than on most purely depressive black metal releases, (although the former certainly outweighs the latter).
A recommended listen for connoisseurs of shaded darkness and lustrous anguish.
Wonderbox Metal 