Pensées Nocturnes: Vacuum

The night is a time of grief, a time of uninhabited and awe-inspiring darkness.  Anguish and sorrow gush out around the edges of the night, dance around the darkness like children on a playground.  Apathy is nonexistent yet omnipresent; rain and wind roam freely beyond the bustle of banalities.  Pipes drip without recognition or care.  Cars pass without passengers or drivers.  Umbrellas and paper float peculiarly in the wind.  Stranded individuals glide upon the rain drenched sidewalks, never glancing at one another, never receiving or rewarding acknowledgement.  The night is a breathing entity that consumes; without prejudice, without thought.  Vacuum is an eloquent ode to the night, complementing its resilient and unforgiving complexion.  Resounding and renovating as it bounds melodies and sorrow to feverish rhythms and despondent vocals, grand hall piano interludes and sensual overtures riddle the album like calculated bullet holes.

Vacuum is an eclectic album, consisting of many different sounds and venues that the melodies pay homage to.  Predominantly, the album is driven by remorse and melancholy, but a lingering sense of permutation tinges the atmosphere throughout its entirety.  Vacuum is heavily inspired by the bleak yet endearing sounds of classical tunes, a minimalistic symphony for the desolate, morose individuals that berate existence.  Scattered throughout the album are piano interludes and classical instrumentation, both being utilized quite well, but not without their depreciation.  The opening track trembles in like a record, instantaneously sweeping us away with a string and piano-laden melody, yet just as quickly transitioning into the shrieking hate-filled fields of depressive black metal.  The black metal fragments of the album are just as the listener would expect.  Higher pitched vocals and resilient, overbearingly toxic riffs that ricochet off one another, bounce around the album sporadically and systematically, almost unnaturally.  The atmospheric segments that these bits collide with seem to be superficial paradigms, like sidewalk chalk in the rain they stand individual without support, yet when the rains begin to fall their value swiftly fades away.  It almost feels contrived the way some of it is incorporated.  It doesn’t seem to enhance the musical quality or the listeners tone, simply another unnoticed extra in some obscure foreign film.

The one stand out track that really irritated me, and ultimately brought about a change in thought, was Coup De Bleus.  I found it be the one track that really deprived me of understanding the entirety of the album.  Depressive black metal is an extremely variable genre subject to instantaneous and sweeping changes, like street lights from red to green it can change on a dime.  But in doing so, you put at risk the listeners overall textual feel of the album.  You risk removing them from the world and atmosphere you’ve so meticulously crafted, and quite possibly ruining the entire experience.  The opening three tracks of Vacuum are fantastic epitaphs of depressive black metal; layered and atmospheric, treacherous and dreary.  The instinctive flow of classical tunes and black metal riots clash and embrace in a soaring vacuum of isolation.  And then Coup De Bleus begins, and you begin to wonder if you haven’t been transported back to the 1930s, sitting in a gloomy cafe with intellects and men in suits.  The track has a heavy blues feel to it, almost optimistic and hopeful, like I want to order another coffee and snap my fingers along.  The track does pick back up into the depressive black metal arena, and it almost really does feel like a brand new song, but in that it loses its scope.  It’s too fragmented and impatient with itself, losing its direction too many times in a song removes the listener completely.  Other than this one stand out track, the rest of the songs feel at rest.  They tend to caress one another like Mozart or Beethoven would, certain distinct melodies appear to dance about in other tracks, making the entire album feel as though it is one instead of multiple.

Pensees Nocturnes’s debut album is one of many ideas, each taking two steps forward and one step backwards.  The classical bits are very well done, incorporated unconventionally into the music as stagnant bits of emotion, breathing deeply and exhaling throughout.  The albums bleeding melodies exude sorrow; weep down upon the entirety of the album like melting icicles atop a tin roof.  Depressive black metal is seen as a genre that’s stagnating, as more and more bands throw their material into a cannibalized genre, innovation is in dire need.  Bands like Pensees Nocturnes affirm that this stagnation isn’t as static as it seems, that renovation and innovation aren’t as distant as we believe.  Because even distance is relative, even hope is subjective, because the vaccination of existence is endowed within albums like these.  They inoculate each and every listener with despair and futility, slowly breeching through insecurities and dreams, past the drivel and nonsensical fragments of meaningless emotions and thoughts.  As you begin to reflect and ponder, reminisce and conceive, you realize existence has already passed you by.  And now you are here.  Now you are here.  Now you are here.

82%

Licht Erlischt: The Narrow Path

Melody is a succession of rhythms, often evoking harmonic delight or euphorical empathy, inciting affection and indiscrete emotion.  It’s a stringent adherence that clings to a particular track like bark on a tree.  It wraps itself around the base, thrusts itself upwards and dances around the branches in glee.  The tree is embraced by it, withstanding nature and its rather unprecedented array of uncertainties.  Music is comprised of countless fragments of melodies, countless arrays of structures and thoughts and instruments, all resulting in audible dissonance.  No matter how you view it, music is simply fragmented and recursive.  The Narrow Path is, in essence, musically unresolved.  

The Narrow Path is the first full length album by Licht Erlischt, a rather obscure black metal band from Norway.  After a relatively above average demo and several spurts of wordless disappearances, the album was finally released into the crowd.  Much like the demo, The Narrow Path is a melodic overture, gagged and bound in a trunk of lonely and forgotten scales and notes.  Instruments without musicians, keys without fingers, a track without the compassion or touch of an artist.  The album is completely bound to these melodies, dependent on each and every one to progress the track in directions it would’ve otherwise completely missed.  Now, I love melodies more than anyone.  They’re quite possibly the most emotive pieces of work that a human being is capable of creating, and rivaled only by visual stimulus.  But when an artist centers his structure and form based upon a melodic arrangement of chords, there are certain directions that simply do not work.  The Narrow Path epitomizes this direction, taking a melody and wrapping it into a philosophical metamorphosis, shifting and twisting as it inevitably progresses forward.  It seems he simply doesn’t understand the fact that songs end, that songs are much like our lives.  We fade in and fade out, most of our time spent dead or unborn.  Within these fleeting moments we’re given, we must accomplish all we desire.  Not all we’re told to, not all we’re supposed to, but all we desire to.  Radiance, for example, is one of the weaker tracks on the album.  Indeed the melody is quite good, but the song simply lacks direction.  It builds, it builds, and eventually ends, ends its dismal existence with nothing more than a putter, a tear, and a final melody.

The Narrow Path is far from amateur, and the songs in their entirety are far from weak or vague.  Melody, as previously noted, is layered throughout the album.  It simply gushes with melancholy.  The tracks are long and slow, but the melodies are sweeping and despondent.  Nerrath’s vocals are Burzum-esque, but not quite as raspy and a bit higher.  Rather uninspired, they lack the somber emotion of the rest of the album.  In The Offshore Oaks, he even includes clean vocals, and they fit the track perfectly.  Mood and atmosphere play an important role for the album, and the melodies just continue to pour down.  With more of a structured tone and a bit more thought, this could’ve been an outstanding release.  The Vaultventurer, for example, boasts a very melancholic melody, and Await The Overarching Blow begins amazingly subversive.  They both, however, fall into the same stale fragmentation, a lack of direction.

Licht Erlischt’s The Narrow Path is far from a terrible album, it’s simply lacking in direction.  The melodies are mournful, treacherous crawls through rain-drenched streets and coves.  They’re the philosophical anecdotes of mankind, of existence and time.  They tread beaten paths of disappointment and success, unknowingly recreating existence and error.  Deceit, sorrow, suffering;  all fragments of melody.  Composition is the glue that binds these emotive works of being together, entwines the listener into the world they’ve created.  Without them, music is senseless drivel, a scapegoat for existence.  A moniker for melodic suicide.  A distant, melancholic melody that breathes in the distance, captured and coveted and strung up.  Vastness embraces it, reconstructs it, and rewinds it.  Why piece together the fragments of melody – beauty, sorrow, despair; the stagnated bits and pieces you never bothered to notice?

71%

Ancestral: Avowal

A hazy forest swallowed in fog and rain, chains of dreary isolation tugging at your sleeve as the silent indulgence of an emotional cataract collapses on top of you.  Tears tugging at your eyes, the vast forest a glimpse of beauty and joy, a facade of happiness to cower behind.  Ancestral is your overwhelming sense of relief as you begin to realize why you’re here.  Ancestral is the sound of desolate roads and wrong turns, misguiding your dreams and deceiving your intuition, a shattering and mending of the silent transition between reality and illusions.  Avowal, Ancestrals second album, is a defiant enigma that penetrates its listener on a personal basis.  This is an album of subtle simplicity, an album that meekly wanders around the forest softly whispering its elegy to whomever chooses to listen.  It doesn’t seek restitution or attention or glory.  It’s simply there, a humble catharsis trotting aimlessly along.

Avowal is more than a simple depressive black metal release.  Yes, it does contain all of your essential ingredients, it contains your mournful riffing and desolate vocals, the gloomy atmosphere and depressive aesthetics dragging your mind into a pool of hatred and loneliness.  The entire album feels so subtle, so alone and deprived of importance or hope.   It feels like I’m standing in a desert, dehydrated and alone, staring up at the dark rain clouds as they slowly float by.  The question is there, but the answer is irrelevant.  Asking will only defeat the purpose, the relentless pounding of your undeniable arrogance is torn out and beaten ruthlessly.  This is an album that questions who we are in the most subtle ways possible.  A painting hanging in our living rooms, the bleak colors of our lives strewn and tossed about a canvas for you to reflect upon, to dream upon, cry upon.  Ugliness and pain showcased in the broom closet of our minds, simply procured to peak our individual curiosity.  I can’t begin to put into words the amount of emotion laced into my thoughts as I began to listen to this.  The albums bleeding melodies encapsulated my mind, comforting my faults and caressing my emptiness in the most humble of ways.  The album is depressing in nature, but only when it’s truly embraced can it cause unbearable amounts of self-reflective tragedy and pain.  Your mental playground ripped to pieces, a wastebasket of crumpled dreams and shredded thoughts glazed over by a hooded figure slowly wandering off.

The production is very good for a self release, yet is below studio quality for obvious reasons.  Music like this does not require top notch production and should not be subject to it.  The cold, distant aura evoked by this is absolutely perfect in every way.  The droning guitars and plodding drums compliment the pessimistic and haunting vocals as they entwine together in a collage of contempt and daunting shadows.  Everything meshes together eloquently and concisely, the individual instruments colliding flawlessly like old friends reuniting.  The music heavily relies on atmosphere and succeeds in every aspect, not one moment wasted on useless silence or stale melodies.  As fruitful as it all may seem, the flawless nature seems to be its one glaring flaw.  The music itself doesn’t contain anything new or innovative, rather taking average black metal and adding a structureless and personal basis to the album.  All three tracks were created to be a soundtrack for thought, the railroads of our emotional trains and highways of our indecisive minds.  A flat, clean mirror placed before your face, delicately requesting that you take a look deeper.  You lose yourself in your own eyes, lose your train of thought to the derailment of Avowal, lose your breath to the drowning decadence of time.

Avowal is an extremely personal album, a soundtrack to the constant waves of long forgotten memories and hidden thoughts obscured by the trials of life.  It doesn’t thrust itself on the listener, it doesn’t force us to reexamine our lives or those around us, it simply slips by unnoticed.  It’s like witnessing something beautiful that simply astounds you, something that falls from the sky without reason or cause.  The rising sun in the dawn sky, shadowy figures of passing birds dot the skyline with their graceful movement and timeless sense of prosperity.  The reuniting of a lost child and his mother, the seamless transition between stressful worry and overwhelming joy reflecting the dreamless hope of an everlasting love.  The snapshots of life we are presented with to cherish, the moments of time we wish we could rewind to replay in the distant corners of our minds.  This is the soundtrack to your deepest feelings of solitude and joy, your deepest feelings of worthlessness and pride that sustain themselves just above your conscious.  Hiding away from ever being seen, this album brings them to light.  A lingering expression of cloned sentiments mirrored for you to view, an empty canvas awaiting your strokes of progression and self mutilation.  The true beauty of your absence glaring back through the shattered realm of a schizophrenic mind.  The true beauty of your life ending one moment at a time.

98%

Thy Light: Suici.De.Pression

Remove society from this world.  Remove every idea, thought, dream, and hope and retain a world left untouched.  Replace the sun with utter darkness, replace sound with silence and emotion with apathy.  Now take this unscathed world and place upon it Paulo, a damp, cold basement, several instruments, and utter solitude.  This is exactly the type of atmosphere Thy Lights second demo evokes on us.  Utter solitude.  This album takes us to the deepest parts of our minds we never thought existed, to doors never noticed, rooms never lit.

This demo is one of the few that I own that can create such an atmosphere that I honestly need human interaction afterwards just to know I’m alive.  The beginning of the demo opens with a beautiful piano passage, a bloodstained door opening inwards revealing a downward spiral of stairs.  The sound of boards creaking and trembling as you begin your descent, the unknown darkness entwines itself around you, grasping and clawing at your body as it drags you inwards.  Sorrow engulfs your mind, your thoughts clouded by endless dreams of desperation and pain.  The piano introduction sets the mood, like a perfect movie trailer it foreshadows what lies ahead instead of presenting the forthcoming material.  Like the calming of ashes after a midnight blaze, the fuzzy reverberation echoes in the darkness as the introduction comes to a close.  A trepidation of senses, an exorcism of aesthetic qualities, the deprivation of hope and meaning.  The second song is magnificently spell bounding and probably the best song of the demo.  A mournful atmosphere only attained through death, a recording of such despair and hopelessness, I cannot understand how this man is still alive. He perfectly conveys his elegy, his cycle of life, the futility of dreams and ineffectiveness of human progression.

Instrumentally, the album is quite simplistic.  Drums are nothing worth noting, simple beats repeated throughout never once overbearing the song or playing too subtle.  The guitar tone is perfect, cold and bleak, melancholic and mournful.  The melodies are beautiful, the solos are haunting and prodigious, and the overwhelming emotion strummed into each note is breathtaking.  The vocals are in a world of their own.  Harrowing shrieks of desperation and grief shaking the very facade you cower behind, your mourning walls collapse.  They are honestly the single greatest part of this demo, absolutely devastating in every aspect.  His hatred and solitude being channeled through his voice into the very depths of your soul, wrapping itself around your heart and thrusting itself inside.  They sound human, not superficial or blatantly altered in anyway.  The production is what you’d expect from an underground black metal artist, but not horrible by any means.  The fuzzy feedback adds to the atmosphere of desolation, as clean production would absolutely destroy it.

A despondent aggregation of isolation and reclusiveness, this demo is beyond words.  It is more than a simple black metal release spawned by children with face paint and black clothes.  It is the story of solitude, the effects of loneliness, and the garnered respect for the minuscule moments of our lives you attain.  When presented with something so dead and cold, you can only look upon yourself and your environment differently, relishing in what little you have in your fleeting aggregation of moments.  This is the demo for those moments.  This is the demo where you realize what life is truly compromised of.   Go on, open the door.

97%

Nyktalgia: Peisithanatos

As a previous reviewer did, I followed in suite, trekking outside my home into the gloomy darkness of the outside world.  I treaded alongside dreary forests and high rising electrical poles, the full moon glooming at my back and casting an eerie shadow before me.  I tearfully crawled up empty fields and hollow forests, the streets empty and houses dim, not a single soul or motor vehicle in sight, all the while the pulsating sound of audible suicide tearing through my veins.  This is Nyktalgias second outing, a depressive masterpiece bound to be praised for years to come.  After being shattered by their debut album, I had high hopes going into their newest offering and came out alive, but just barely.

This is a difficult album to relay with words, as previously noted, as I see it as being schizophrenic.  The first song, and without a doubt one of their best songs, is emotionally straining.  It reminds me of Exitus Letalis, beginning extremely catchy and melodic only to sweep into a much slower riff with the high pitched vocals piercing the bleak atmosphere.  It truly is amazing, yet somehow, one of the most depressing things I’ve ever heard.  Treading alongside the moonlit forest in the early hours of the morning, the sound of Nyktalgia blaring directly into my mind, the hate-filled vocals screeching and ripping at my soul, I truly felt alone.  So desolate and deprived of importance or reason, I somberly walked on without direction or hope.  It didn’t help the situation when the rain began to fall just as Skjeld crawls into the song, his screeching devastation tearing down my quintessential empire.

The reason I’m calling this album schizophrenic is the second song, Nekrolog.  It completely shattered the atmosphere the first song built up to.  Instead of another melancholic and beautiful riff, it opted for a more upbeat, generic black metal riff.  The vocals also shift into a lower growl, not quite death metal but not quite Nyktalgia.  The lower vocal style mixed in with thundering blast beats and a generic riff-driven feel, I felt cheated.  It felt like a failed suicide, like the rope was cut or the water was drained.  Just another filler track lacking any emotional drive or thought-provoking feel the entire ride through.  I believe I forgot it just as it ended.

The third song resembles a mixture of the first two, the bipolar brainchild of depression and hope.  The song begins and I think to myself “Oh boy, here we go again”.  I was already in a bit of a happy mood, and honestly thought about switching over to Mayhem or 1349 just in spite of what I heard out of the second track.  As the song continued on, it progressively improved into the atmosphere I had longed for. Perfect timing as well, just as the vocals kicked in to send a chilling nostalgia through my veins, my melodic catharsis.  The song continues on and on, and after awhile, my mind began to drift.  Not because of boredom, but because of the constant stream of bellowing drums and haunting guitars retaining a mellow atmosphere perfect for dreaming.  I transcended into a cesspool of fragmented hopes and long forgotten dreams, all the while terrorizing vocals screaming at me, my longing to remember kicked back into perspective. Winterhearts fantastic drumming pounding on my skull just as the song closes, another masterpiece suiciding upon impact.

The fourth and final song is more or less the same.  A catchy bass line and harrowing vocals haunting the track throughout its ten minute span.  A satisfying finale to a malignant album, a volatile aggregation of sorrow and grief spewed forth over some of the most devastating vocals ever presented.  The production must be noted, seeing as it’s an enormous improvement over the first album.  Every instrument is clearly heard and retains its individuality throughout the entire album, not one dominant over another.  Skjeld is just as amazing as before, reaching unparalleled screams that reverberate in your mind for days to come.   This truly reaches the pinnacle of the suicidal black metal genre, an isolated plague set forth to harvest happiness and optimism, an album fueled by sorrow and absolute hatred.  Nyktalgia have surpassed all expectations and released yet another beautiful and eloquent album, destroying all that is beaming with joy and happiness in its wake.  Embrace the emptiness and give in to your foreboding demise.  Nyktalgia is calling.

91%

Gris: Il était une forêt…

After being completely spellbound by Niflheim’s Neurasthénie, I was eagerly anticipating the bands second monster, Il était une forêt…  This is, without a doubt, some of the most depressing and soul crushing black metal to ever grace my ears.  It’s not your atmospheric riff-happy black metal a la Peste Noire, but the type of music to drown yourself in.  Enigmatic melody, eloquent in nature, and simply destructive beyond hope.  This truly is an album to wash your soul with.

If you enjoyed anything done by Niflheim, you will surely enjoy this album.  Production is, like the previous reviewer noted, top notch.  Fantastic.  Outstanding.  Everything sounds beautiful and no instrument dominates the mix.   The vocals are absolutely astounding.  They’re a mix between dreadful screaming (or morbid moaning) black metal shrieking, and soft, spoken lyrics.  They are definitely a large part of the music and a high point of the album.  The melodies in this album are precisely what makes it what it is.  They are beautiful, mournful, and poetic without being overly cheesy or drawn out.  To sit in solitude and confine yourself from life and its obligations recreates this album, especially in the first track Il était une forêt… and final track La Dryade.  Both are easily the best songs on this album.  La Dryade is a painful 10 minute epilogue, wrapping up the album and leaving the listener in utter despair and isolation.  It’s purely instrumental, using a piano, a guitar, and a cello.  Somber, to say the least.  Il était une forêt… is a very well composed song.  The vocals for the first two minutes are utterly devastating.  No lyrics, no spoken words, just the vocalist hurling his angst at the unsuspecting listener.  The song doesn’t let up until the first break, where it seems the allow glimpses of hope and happiness to seep in.  Low and behold, it does not.

A fantastic album from start to finish, a true Canadian masterpiece that deserves unabashed praise.  This album, along with their first, requires the listener to devote their attention and emotion to the sound of an emphatic, if ever fleeting, suffering.  Gris definitely has a bright future, as clearly portrayed by their first two studio albums. I only hope they can keep up the fantastic work and continue creating some of the gloomiest despair ever recorded.

92%