Nachtvorst - Stills (2009)

Deze recensie heb ik geschreven voor Rate Your Music, maar ik dacht ik post em hier ook:

When you’re browsing sites for new and obscure releases you’ll probably won’t find much that is worthwhile, but sometimes you’ll hit the jackpot, which is exactly what I did with Nachtvorst. This new band from my home country (The Netherlands) put out a debut album that a lot of renowned metal bands should be jealous of. They combine black and sludge metal with postrock-esque crescendos like they have been playing them for years. Not that they sound like a stale, boring samey soso Isis clone, but they just pull it off so easy that it hardly believable that this is their debut album.

Although I can’t seem to find a lot of information about them, it seems like one man (Leopold) is the one responsible for all of the instruments on the album except for the vocals which are done by Erghal. This Leopold plays the guitar, bass, piano and drums on the album, and I read somewhere that he also co-produced it. Sure, one-man-bands are quite common in black metal, but I never heard Burzum sounds so tight, so technical and so well produced. The vocals are done by Erghal who certainly does his job right here. He shrieks, wails and howls over the songs, uses everything in his range. And his range is quite impressive, going from low death-grunts to high pitched shrieks and some other strange unorthodox styles falling in between.

The album consists of 5 songs, 4 long pieces and 1 drony instrumental. The title-track “Stills” may be of yet my favorite song on the album, starting out with an atmospheric piano intro going into a melodic section, with their trademark epic-raspy vocals and ending in a 4 minute instrumental outro where the lead guitar hoovers over the sludgy riffing. Those ending minutes are the highlight on the album, for me at least, where a spooky feedback-loden lead guitar wails over a riffs that seems to build and disintegrate at the same time, ending in a cold snowy wasteland where everything has slowly faded away.

The rest of the album may not reach the highs reached in the outro from Stills, but there aren’t any parts to be skipped either because the music is quite diverse. For example: the instrumental track “Murmurs” doesn’t seem to belong on a black metal album at all if you would have listened to it outside of context. It’s a dark, drony minimalistic song which could have come by the hands of bands like Boris and Jesu at their darkest. “Wanderings” however would not feel out of place on a Dissection album and the closing minutes on their closing song Epitaph suddenly feel a lot more related to the suicidal depressive black metal genre. These varieties of styles do flow together as one, because they are integrated on every song on the album with care, so that it doesn’t sound like some random genre-hopping nonsense.

With their debut album “Stills”, Nachtvorst immediately ranked themselves among my favorite metal bands of the past 5 years and I’m really craving for a new album.