Italy has produced a long list of goth metal bands, many of which have had female lead singers with very angelic voices.

But the Foreshadowing are an Italian goth metal outfit with a male lead singer: Marco Benevento, who handles himself convincingly well on the band's ultra-gloomy debut album, Days of Nothing.

Benevento's performances are absolutely dripping with sadness, sorrow, pessimism, and despair, and he has the type of voice that would have made him perfect for Depeche Mode.

In fact, brooding material such as "Death Is Our Freedom," "Into the Lips of the Earth," "Departure," and "Ladykiller" could arguably be described as a metal equivalent of Depeche Mode.

But then, quite a few of the non-female-fronted goth metal bands that have come from Europe in the '90s or the 21st century have given listeners some indication of what Depeche Mode might have sounded like as a metal band -- and anyone who has spent a lot of time listening to goth metal won't find this 2006 recording to be groundbreaking by late-2000s standards.

But what Days of Nothing lacks in originality, it makes up for when it comes to quality and craftsmanship.

Benevento sings in English exclusively on this 52-minute CD; none of the lyrics are in Italian, although Italian, Spanish, and other Romance languages can sound quite good on goth rock or goth metal recordings (Latin America and Spain have both given listeners some worthwhile Spanish-language goth discs).

But commercially, recording this album in English instead of Italian made sense for the Foreshadowing, whose Days of Nothing is a solid, if derivative, example of what Italy's goth metal scene had to offer in 2006.