Blut aus Nord are one of these bands whose large body of work might be an obstacle for a reviewer because is it possible for the band to come up with anything new? To find a new way of storytelling? To create unheard songstructures? If you, like me, answer these questions with a smirking shoulder hinching, then you might also think to analyse the new record Disharmonium – Nahab should be looked at as an individual entity and not as the 24th release (including four collaborative releaeses) by a highly productive band!
To make it clear, even if you want to treat Nahab as an individual record, that is a difficult task as it is the second part of a trilogy of records named Disharmonium, another trilogy one might say as the band has already three to their credits, the 777, What Once Was and Memoria Vetusta - here we already have nine of those 24 releases; and with the third part of Disharmonium we’ll have 12 “trilogy-records” out of 25 releases. But we wanted to stick to Nahab…
The record has everything that Blut aus Nord is famous for by now, you get this mix of Ambient passages, furious Black Metal and trashing Death Metal - yes, TRASHING because nothing will be able to withstand the sheer energy and willpower that comes with so many Blut aus Nord tracks. It all begins with the first of three (see, they must be obsessed with everything trinit-ological!) ”Hideous Dream Opus”-tracks. All three somewhere between 60 and 80 seconds long and simple but highly effective interludes full of manical, swelling Dark Ambient music serving as intros to the tracks following. The track lengths are also mighty interesting as we get eight regular tracks with a bit more 38 minutes, so one should expect any overly long tracks – the longest one is still clearly under six minutes, which leads to an interesting question – do the French guys around mastermind Vindsval try not to overpower our attention spans? Or are they rather trying to cut some unnecessary chunks off of their songs so we can give the songs our full attention without breaking our sweat too much and thus not being able to not “enjoy” the next tracks as much as possible?
No matter if we regard all of this as service to the listeners or as a methodological way of ensuring enough attention for each of the tracks one must assess that the swirling guitars and synths over all the chaos are a mesmerizing thing as the spiral does not seem to wind downwards but rather upwards – as if the Luciferian realms are heaven-bound and not writhing down at the hottest cores of our Earth, as if we are to blister away in the burning sunlight of the synths and not to decay away burnt to coals by the below-ground bass lines. The elements of the tracks are somewhere between Ulcerate’s Chaotic Avantgarde Death Metal and Ultha’s Atmospheric Black Metal. One great example for this would be ”The Endless Multitude” for we are witnessing some straight rocking drums, aided spooky background spheres, a few mighty reverbed breaks, much hushed-up-lushed-up Lo-Fi synths and the ever-rattling rasp that is Vindsval’s vocals. When the Carpenter’esque synth lines are added we have a nightmare that comes in a multitude of shapes and an endless life. However, the song is not mainly aiming at purveying an everlasting sequence of nightmarish images in our subconscious but also at giving some dark calmer passages with only some keys, vast dark spaces and several very subdued drum beats especially on the cymbals. When the full blast attack comes back for the final half minute it’s close to a relief in a very strange way.
The band enriches their sound with little elements like e.g. several short repetitive synth-layers in ”Queen of the Dead Dimension” or the chaotic vocals and trumpet-like elements at the beginning of ”The Black Vortex” and the near-simple-rock staccatos on the drums in the middle passage of ”The Ultimate Void of Chaos”. Or the somewhat subdued Gregorian chants in the beackground of ”Forgotten Aeon”. This is state of the art Avantgarde Black Metal or Blackened Math-Core, or whatever label you need to give such visionary music.
Without indicating where this record ranks in my very own Blut aus Nord-hierarchy it remains clear that this band is so hard to beat at what they are doing with every new release. It is clear that they’re not done yet, and I do not mean “they’re not dead as they need to finish this trilogy”. Pretty sure that these French introverts will stick around for pretty long and give us many more records that will challenge our way of perceiving and understanding music.
