With Verity, Nokturnal Mortum continue down the more commercial path they started embarking on The Voice of Steel and their half of last year’s The Spirit Never Dies split with Graveland: commercialized rock-constructed music with Ukrainian folk and power metal aesthetics. On the inferior half of the The Spirit Never Dies, Nokturnal Mortum abandoned the use of the progressive rock techniques with speed, power, and Gothenburg metal riffs to craft compositions similar to the extended, droning flowing black metal compositions of past greats. Verity continues the slide down into Wacken fare.
The riffs are much worse if the songs even are based around riffs and aren’t just folk pop radio constructions. These riffs are usually in the 1990s and early 2000s popular rock music style than metal; they mostly resemble what Metallica and Megadeth were playing in the 90s. Frequent metalcore breakdowns will make die hard underground metal fans cringe harder than they did upon hearing the power metal “Ukraine” on The Voice of Steel.
Most of Nokturnal Mortum’s compositions drone on for far too long as does the album’s overall running time too. Verity peaks with the homage to Emperor‘s “Cosmic Keys to My Creation & Times” on “З чортом за пазухою” (With Chort in My Bosom). Most metal fans will turn it off there and put on the sublime In the Nigthside Eclipse instead. You should too. Nokturnal Mortum have clearly made an album targeted at hipster beardos, renaissance fairies, fools who like Agalloch, and Wacken drunks. Their original late 90s keyboard “black metal” fans and the newer progressive rock and heavy metal ones they gained with The Voice of Steel will surely be alienated by Verity.
Tags: 2017, black 'n roll, folk, folk metal, folk rock, metalcore, nokturnal mortum, review, Ukraine, verity
“Frequent metalcore breakdowns to make die hard underground metal fans cringe harder than they did upon hearing the power metal “Ukraine” on The Voice of Steel.”
You’d think so, but take a look at the NWN forum. They’re eating this album up.
The “underground” is just a mirror image of the shitty consumerist overground at this point.
This is why real curators are necessary. On one hand you have kids who are still buying nuclear blast releases and looking forward to the next Amon Amarth album, on the other hand you have guys who get swept up in the phony hype of flashes in the pan like Teitanblood and who talk up Finntroll-tier material as long as it hits enough underground/NS/quasi-racist checkmarks.
Except the one guy keeping it real who nobody in on the funderground circle jerk believes: “Sorry, but this sounds like 1/2 poor man’s Negura Bunget and 1/2 Ukraine’s Eurovision candidate.”
also what’s up with that digital vomit production? It legit hurts my ears
Solarcore flowing stream of black excrement would be a more apt descripion.
A shame my fellow Slavs have trouble making real black metal and make shit like this instead, even local bands here sound like this, it’s like they take the TV jingles of our shitty Slavic detergent and just make metal covers of them. That’s what happens when your brain is constantly on moonshine and krokodil.
Not flashy, but moody. Sit down and let them play.
I’d write something about if I had time and energy…
As Sahar – Phenomistik (1996)
After that dub/reggae part on Voice of Steel how could any black metal fan take this band seriously?
Nokturnal Mortum has always had cringe-worthy popular music parts.
Lunar Poetry and Goat Horns are top of the line releases in the slavcore canon.
Still better than neChrist, it’s all been uphill for them since 1999 if you really put their career in perspective. That was one of the small handful of albums I’ve ever owned that was such a fucking mess I couldn’t even sell it in good faith and had to smash it to pieces on general principle.
Nechrist and Judas Iscariot’s Heaven in Flames were the albums that introduced me to really bad black metal back in the day. Nechrist might have been worse, it was like a homosexual retard midget circus. Later on I heard Lunar Poetry and Goat Horns and they were also mindless and fruity. It’s hard to understand how this band has an audience outside of its parents’ basement.
On the strength of that review, I’m dialing up neChrist presently.
…
It sounds like Def Heaven with M.I.D.I. trumpets.
another pointless review by a pointless FAGGOT. GET AIDS YOU FAT CUNT!
I also thought about Eurovision when first listening to this… It is indeed folk pop way worse than the rock stuff they put out on Golos Stali, which was definitely not metal but still decent in a way or two. I’m afraid with this the band has gone past the point of no return.
You mean Brett. It’s the same person
This release is pretty dam excellent.
NM will never be wacken material because of there controversial past so that’s a ridiculous statement. They have also are Not on a big label like some of the commercial death metal tripe that deathmetal.org raves on about.
Poor review.