The experimental Neofolk outfit of Rome strikes back with a new album
ROME, the Luxembourgish folk noir outfit helmed by Jerome Reuter, releases the new album “The Lone Furrow” via Trisol Music Group. The album features guest appearances guest appearances from a range of heavy metal luminaries including BEHEMOTH’s Adam Nergal Darski, PRIMORDIAL’s Alan Averill, Laure Le Prunenec of RÏCÏNN and Joseph D. Rowland of US-doom band PALLBEARER, J.J. of Austria’s HARAKIRI FOR THE SKY.
The tracklisting for the album is:
1. Masters Of The Earth (ft. Aki Cederberg)
2. Tyriat Sig Tyrias
3. Ächtung, Baby! (ft. Alan Averill of PRIMORDIAL)
4. Making Enemies In The New Age (ft. Joseph D. Rowland of PALLBEARER)
5. The Angry Cup (ft. Adam Nergal Darski of BEHEMOTH/ME AND THAT MAN)
6. The Twain
7. Kali Yuga Über Alles
8. The Weight Of Light
9. The Lay Of Iria (ft. J. J. of HARAKIRI FOR THE SKY)
10. On Albion’s Plain
11. Palmyra (ft. Laure Le Prunenec of RÏCÏNN)
12. Obsidian
13. A Peak Of One’s Own
Following on from the universal acclaim of their latest LP “Le Ceneri Di Heliodoro”, ROME releases one of the most impressive releases in its prolific career of 15 years. “The Lone Furrow” is the logical culmination of ROME’s previous endeavors, a brilliant and patient demolition of the despiritualized modern age, timeless in its critique of man’s greed and the deliberate desecration of beautiful things.
ROME is back to fearlessly settle accounts of the spirit, with that grave trademark voice, whose tone can be likened to a wise-man’s oracle, deepened by countless cigars and pools of stout, or, at times, a Stuka bomber nose-diving into dry gravel.
ROME’s art always stays slightly beyond the pale and Reuter certainly is what the mainstream would call a joyous outsider. “The Lone Furrow” is a mordant, clear-eyed critique of the modern world, spun with the delicacy of a spiderweb; a journey through the ravaged landscapes of history; a spiritual quest weaving a unique poetry of withdrawal from the troubling world into distant retreats. And yet, at the same time, this collection of remarkable compositions is a generous invitation to a great European Tradition of literary thought from Hesse to Nietzsche, from Tacitus to Orwell, from Ovid to the Edda, from Yeats to Baudelaire.
ROME is a dark world that glows with the intensity of Jerome’s remarkable gift for language. Its multilingual nature has always been an essential part of ROME – certainly in its sample work- and Reuter is showcasing this by singing (mainly) in English but including songs in French and German on “The Lone Furrow” as well.
At the centre of these songs we find the individual mediating between a sense of history and an experience of the world. ROME illuminates us on the fact that art is to make our world whole and comprehensible, restoring it to us in all its glory and all its darkness, not through argument but through feeling and thus closing the gap between individuals and thus transcending from feeling to meaning. In this way, art can reconcile us to human life through the pursuit and cultivation of beauty.
On “The Lone Furrow” ROME weaves a fantastical tale in which gods and men alike ache and tremble, and which reminds us that the world is much larger than our ideas of it, our traditions much deeper than we imagine. Most importantly, ROME refuses the easy answer.
