Nargaroth
Sweeping immersive mood doubling paranoia in the style of Burzum; this will suspend reality for some time at least.
Herbestleyd
No Colours
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1999
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Production: Competent and deliberate studio.
Review: Riding the fine line between beauty and savagery that bands like Burzum or Darkthrone exploited, Nargaroth render intricate lengthy compositions into sweeping guitar harmonization or predatory power chord black metal at medium tempo. The expertise of this band is not the technique it carries from the previous generation but the sense of place and existential change that crowns these narrative works.
With harsh throat tissue exfoliation projecting vocals with inverted operatic intensity and percussion following containment patterns at moderate pace, the band charge into creation with a sense of introduction and ceremony that presents the song itself as a component of transitional material and allows recognition of completion only at the end of the narrative. Place is created through mood in the dark melodies stitched a handful at a time through the strumming of internal patterns, and mood expands into setting through familiarity of symbols and reference to isolation surrounding it. This alienation allows content to move freely, both as conjecture and passionate identification.
Tracklist:
1. Introduction - Herbstleyd
2. Karmageddon
3. Nargaroth
4. Des alten Kriegers Seelenruh
5. Amarok - Zorn des Lammes
6. Das Schwarze Gemälde
7. Vom Traum, Die Menschheit zu töten - Outroduction
Length: 69:43
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Copyright © 1999 No Colours
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Surmounting their own obstacles and instantiating their own achievements, songs peak with dynamics of the greatest simplicity and proliferate with increasingly internally recursive patterns, appearing as the growth of a forest must in time-delay photos from space over 5,000 years. Convergent melodies equalize with previous thematic tonal centers and allow liquid rise into the black unformed above, a context in which Nargaroth use silence and musical ambiguity as a weapon to infect and draw in the listener in the same way an enigmatic novel might.
Chaotic multiple directions cement song construction and order the principles of its balance with shape and texture. Culminating in terror or negativity, music often fades before returning as if reborn with inverted values, deconstructing its own origins and recreating its will in carving the extraneous into logicality. As a black metal album "Herbestleyd" disregards current refinements in form to accelerate artistic visions of the eternal struggle of consciousness against nothingness from the perspective of a blood and flesh organism.
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Production: Varying raw but listenable sound.
Review: In the swirling unformed chaos of the human subconscious a receptor exists to the strobing and gentle patterns of falling water or light through trees or death in a human being, finding in this structure between the obvious division points of reality a revelation of the transcendent nature of consciousness as itself a property of no thing but the universe, and in that universe, nothingness and destruction. Soaringly melodic where appropriate, mesmerizingly recursive in harmonic phenomena and layers of alternating rhythmic emphasis, and rashly aggressive where necessary this release fulfills the darkened promise of isolated classicist black metal.
Hailing Burzum as a great influence in both the cover of "Spell of Destruction" and the use of strobing sweep picking to articulate melodies within established root note progressions, Nargaroth make from these techniques and a sense of antiquity in evenness of melodic development a form of ambience that levitates and whisks itself through time and space at a fast pace within a much slower pace, evoking naturalism in its understanding of evolutionary patterning and recurrence. Structures are inventive buth often focused around the continuity of interlocked loops of sound in variation of allusive configuration.
Organic in its washing subliminal morbidity of slowly undulating bass sounds, this release features throat fillet vocals in abstract accompaniment to glacial motion of sound, howled by a seemingly distracted listener with emphasis foreshadowing change in song. Minimal but alert drumming and dominating envelope of guitar sound frame space for vocals and dynamic variation in song to present and ferment epics of gradual change and eventually perceptual shift as previous tokens become redefined in nothingness by the progress of a narration toward a resolution in some dissonance peacefully swept into a strong declaration of major theme.
Darkly formulated and conceptualized beyond human concerns, the homage to natural sound and the spirit of intelligent beings that is this release will be appreciated for ongoing time because of its fluid and logical coherence in the midst of chaotic potential and recombinations of tangents to motif cores, bringing a sense of theme through nebular silhouette and elucidating the classic black metal fascination with resonance in deconstructed self-becoming music.
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