Inglourious Belli?

Normally I don’t report on albums so far in advance that neither a label nor release date has been set. That’s not useful. But this is so strange and potentially interesting as a trainwreck that I had to report on it.

Here’s Glorior Belli‘s history in an extremely brief nutshell.

Album 1: Raw black metal
Album 2: Overly polished black metal
Album 3: Polished mix of black metal and bluesy rock, almost like Alice in Chains (reviewed here)

Which brings us to Album 4, The Full Intrepid Experience of Light. You can see the artwork, track list, and announcement here. Note this paragraph:

Described as an alternative and experimental record by founding member J. (formerly known as Infestvvs), Glorior Belli is one of the most unconventional band around these days, once again messing around with the codes, mixing extreme metal and surprising indie tunes together in a massively demented new album!

In the past year, J. dropped his black metal name, sacked all his bandmates, and turned Glorior Belli into a solo project. (Frostmoon Eclipse’s Gionata Potenti laid down the drums for the new album.)

He’s also evidently gone off the deep end, as “Agitation in the Glorious Theme”, a song from the new album, sounds nothing like previous Glorior Belli efforts. It’s not even metal. It sounds like Jane’s Addiction with the flu. Wah-wah guitars and funky bass? What’s going on???

Perhaps one can trace an “evolution” up to this point through the other songs in the MySpace player below. “Once in a Blood Red Moon”, “There Is But One Light”, and “In Every Grief-Stricken Blues” come from Album 3. “Deadly Sparks” and “Said Lucifer in Twilight” come from Album 2. “In Paradisvm…” comes from Album 1. But this new “surprising indie tune” is exactly that.

As an experimental album, TFIEOL could be even more of a disaster than the last 1349 record. Or it could be awesome (though that looks unlikely at this point.) Stay tuned.

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