Band:	Your Tomorrow Alone
Album:	Ordinary Lives
Style:	Progressive doom metal, Gothic metal
Release date:	January 2012

01. Renaissence
02. Praise For Nothing
03. The Essence Of Gloom
04. Guilty
05. Bursting Hope
06. Far From The Sight
07. One Last Breath
08. Agony (Praeludium)
09. In Silence

Rating supplement: If you like elegant releases and don't mind occasionally being sonically dipped into cheese, attend to this immediately.

Say what you want of how the regions and countries of a band's origin have nothing to do with the actual sound of a band, but I still subscribe to the theory. Even if I didn't tell you the gothic/doom(y) act Your Tomorrow Alone hails from Italy, you would have guessed it based on this review alone. Ordinary Lives contains a certain amount of cheese Italian acts are known for, but that is balanced out by warmth and grace that not a lot of bands show.

The band describes their music as "clearly influenced by British Doom/Gothic metal bands like Paradise Lost, Anathema, My Dying Bride", and also claims to have added a 70's prog-ish twist and a "suspended and rarified atmosphere" into their songs. That description is indeed correct for the most part. At first glance, this is quite a standard affair - slow songs, clean and harsh vocals entwine, the focus alternates between the guitars and the keyboards (being slightly more in favor of the guitars), rhythms are slow and for the most part simple, yet energetic. After a spin or two, you'll conclude there's nothing more to hear, but if you've been extra attentive, you'll notice that, despite its simplicity, it has a certain elusive charm that disables you to wrap your head around it fully. That's when you'll decide to try again.

And be rewarded for it, for that's when the subtle progression and gloom kick in. Careful layering and contrasts between the solid, melodic whole and occasional outbursts of angry despair become more enjoyable with each spin. Your Tomorrow Alone could be, if they play their cards right, successors of their countrymen Novembre. True, Novembre are murkier and way more organic - Your Tomorrow Alone is more on the cliché, red-roses-in-the-ruins side of gothic/doom - but both demonstrate a restrained elegance in expressing emotions, which, when contrasted with Your Tomorrow Alone's soaring melodiousness, gives an impression of painful shyness (which warms my little heart!), from which a man only breaks for short periods of time and immediately regrets it afterwards.

The performance is of course top notch (seems like there's not a lot of bands which can't play nowadays!), but what should especially be noted are the interesting vocal parts, performed by two singers, with occasional sung/recited parts in Italian; the clean vocalist Giovanni reminds me of singers such as Kjetil Nordhus (Green Carnation) and Attila Bakos (Taranis) and sometimes even Lars Eikind (Winds, ex-Before The Dawn).

Listening to Ordinary Lives is like having a candlelit dinner in a crumbling castle while violins are playing in the background - you can't help but chuckle a little at the very premise of it, but you'd have to be cynical to resist the charm of it. But, since most metalheads are cynical, proceed with caution.