Nihl

Not for the first time and not for the last has German label Iron Bonehead Productions found a new band that promises a lot with its debut release, and one also riding the trend of ambient blackened death doom. This time IBP has scooped up Spanish death metallers Altarage and their 2016 release "NIHL" and unleashed both band and album into the public metal realm. Yes I know, I'm a bit slow to the party but at least I have the benefit of reading what others here and beyond MA have said about Altarage and "NIHL" and the overall opinion is that these guys are great and the album fires on all cylinders. No doubt about it, as soon as you put the music on, the sheer energy and force the band puts into it hit you like a tidal wave of gritty sound backed by pitiless blast-beat drum pummel, hissing cymbal and stuttering guitar, and continue pounding your ears and brain senseless with slabs of sonic violence.

The sheer brutality of the guitar onslaught and the complex drumming, at once thunderous and flippy, forces listeners to take the music as it comes and let it wash over them. Trying to figure where one song ends and the next begins becomes a pointless exercise because all tracks are equally fast and aren't distinguished by particular riff loop or rhythm motifs, and the breaks between tracks last about a second or so, so if you sneeze between tracks, that'll be your bad luck as the musicians forge ahead on their odyssey like demons possessed. The album is far from being a dense chaotic mess: its sound is actually very clear, every instrument can be heard and the guitars have an amazing sculptural quality as their sharp distorted tones cut and curve into the dark space. At times you'll swear you can hear long dirge-like doomy bass booms underscoring the more frantic tremolo guitar scrabbling. The musicians are very precise in their playing, there is hardly a beat or tune out of place in this surprisingly intricate network of death metal savagery.

The journey through Altarage's universe can be arduous for listeners as each track takes you far into a deeper, blacker level of sonic torture where some amazing riffing and nuclear-powered drumming can be found. The only major downside here is the vocals which are all but swamped by the music: the voices are too limited in range to do justice to the songs. This music either needs dyspeptic swamp-monster guttural roar or slavering reptilian humanoid horror to bring out its full deranged monstrous potential. A minor issue is that the album ends very abruptly as if the musicians weren't too sure that, having brought us deep into their realms of blackened death doom sadism, they should take us back to the familiar physical universe (as if anyone would want to return) or just leave us all to stew into the warp and weft of this hell-hole to await another batch of victims. To be left hanging high and dry after 36+ minutes of full immersion in this dense swirling slab of death metal horror is surely the ultimate insult.

No doubt the band has already gained a lot of fans eager to for a follow-up album where it's to be hoped the vocals will improve in strength and variety and the songs might actually slow down a little and become a bit more distinct and self-contained. Of course this might mean toning down the ferocity and derangement ... I guess if I had to choose between a more structured song-based follow-up album and a recording of more full-on sonic brain rape, I'll have to go for the latter.

I’ve heard some opinions that this album from Altarage titled “Nihl” is a totally sensational debut and that it got very good opinions from the critics. So I got tempted and bought myself a copy of the vinyl, without even checking a single song, hoping that the impression will be insanely great. Now, after a few days of playing this record I can say that I feel disappointed a bit. I’m not saying that “Nihl” is bad, because it’s a decent album, I quite like it, but I am far from calling it the best thing of this year or from using words like “sensational”.

So… what’s wrong with “Nihl”? Well, I feel slightly torn apart when hearing this music and sometimes I cannot make up my mind whether I love it or just hate it. On one hand I have to say that I like that sepulchral, totally ghastly and cold aura that the music awakes. Altarage really can frighten some people with such dose of morbidity and (ravishing, urgh!) grimness. It definitely is one of the coldest and darkest sounding death metal albums I’ve heard in a while. And this aspect is surely the strongest characteristic of “Nihl”, especially when it comes with some killer riffs that I have spotted here and there. But on the other hand Altarage creates such a dense and heavy, monstrous wall of sound that sometimes their music becomes a bit too chaotic and simply unreadable… Which wouldn’t be necessarily a bad thing, but it turns out that a lot of this material starts to sound the same and as such it just gets dull. Obviously you need to listen to “Nihl” carefully, this album requires full focus if you want to catch all its nuances and details. Only then you’ll be able to get into it, but I suppose even in such circumstances it’s not an easy album. Personally I have to say that I was able to catch some exceptionally great fragments, but sometimes I felt bored, so this is why I think that their songwriting still needs an improvement (to avoid writing songs like “Baptism Nihl”, which is just mediocre). Altarage do impress often, especially when they break the neck with furious speed and almost Morbid Angel-esque viciousness, like in “Graehence” or “Vortex Pyramid”. Or in “Altars”, which is just an earthshaking track, with definitely the best riffs and arrangements off the whole album!

The thing which I didn’t like the most though are the vocals. On one hand they sound quite unusual and are far from the typical death grunts, sounding a bit like screams, howls and shrieks that you hear from the distance echoed in a catacomb. Or if someone was growling into the tube, which is even worse. Unfortunately, too often the vocal arrangements seem to have no sense and they don’t even match the music, which is very annoying. They just appear here and there, growl with no sense, creating only cacophony, which surely doesn’t help the listener if he wants to get into “Nihl”. I would prefer to hear more typical, deep growls, which would actually fit the riffs, rather than originally sounding ghastly whispers and shrieks, which don’t match the musical background.

So, I am not sure what should I really think of “Nihl”. It’s a good album, but is it really something that I would recommend to everyone and make such a big fuzz about it? I don’t think so. I surely do not regret buying this record, as it’s a nice addition to the collection, but I wonder if it won’t end up as a dust gatherer rather than something I will play a lot. I have to admit though that even if “Nihl” can reminds you of acts such as Portal, Antediluvian or Impetuous Ritual, they surely belong to those bands, which try to walk their own path of extreme death / black metal. And that counts as something positive. I will keep an eye on them, hoping that for the next album they will improve some aspects of their music, while keeping its sepulchral, eerie aura intact.

Oh, I have to say also that hardly ever the artwork matches the music so perfectly as it’s in case of “Nihl's” killer graphics.

Standout tracks: “Graehence”, “Vortex Pyramid”, “Altars”
Final rate: 69/100

Hailing from Basque County, Spain, enigmatic four piece Altarage have recently released their début album Nihil. Their identities are hidden behind their hooded costumes, bur with precision and terror worthy of this name they play a brand of blackened death metal coming straight from the abyss.



Altarage’s production is decidedly caustic, creating a huge churning maelstrom of sound, there’s nothing raw or amateurish from them here. The guitar sound is huge, a dense downtuned approach that’s exceptionally heavy, a huge grinding tone completely dominating the mix. Altarage are far from a band to rely on tone over substance though, and their technical prowess and range of dissonant riffs throughout the album are fantastic – they’re far removed from the Incantation worship of many abyssal bands. In the faster sections they churn, grind and twist with an unsettling dissonance much like Malthusian, constantly evolving organically over the length of each track with exciting creativity while never letting up on the insane heaviness. When they do slow down the reverb added to the dense tone gives the crushing riffs an epic monumental feel that provides the perfect addition to the churning fury. All the riffs are creative and complex meaning it takes a few listens to the album to really get any of them to get stuck in your head, as Altarage seem more interested in assaulting the grey matter than lodging themselves there.

The vocals are fairly quiet in the mix, beastly low growls and shrieks that become just another element in the abyssal wall of sound, serving to add an extra dimension to the insanity, though on Vortex Pyramid they really shine with an especially vicious performance. It’s also a great performance from the drummer who can go from keeping the pace with technical precision and minimal flair on opener Drevicet, to an absolute speed demon on Vortex Pyramid and the end of Baptism Nihil.

As previously mentioned Nihil is an album that’s just so damned unrelentingly heavy it takes a few listens to really get into the nuances of the whole thing, but after a few listens one can discern that each track isn’t just a slab of monolithically heavy metal, but a well written piece on its own merits. Drevicet is incredibly well paced, moving between through sections of mind-bendingly dissonant grinding riffs to those slow epic crashes of guitar, while Graehence might be the closest thing to anything remotely ‘catchy’ on the album, when the wash of noise kicks into that main riff, a stomping behemoth carried along with mid paced pounding drums in a simple yet effective piece of blackened death metal. Baptism Nihil starts of as a slower doomier number, but picks up more and more as the track goes on, ending up in a rhythmic pounding assault, while Vortex Pyramid goes all out from start to finish. Altars is another track that twists back and forth between tempos with complex technical riffs edging out from within the thick wall of sound and blastbeats, occasionally slowing down into strange atmospheric sections.

Fans of Malthusian and Portal will enjoy this dissonant and exciting début release. It’s only 35 minutes long buit’s so mind-numbingly heavy and has so many ideas it feels a lot longer, an exceptional beast of an album.

Originally written for swirlsofnoise.com

I really liked Altarage’s debut demo (both tracks reappear here) released last year and I was expecting something great for their debut full length, I’m far from disappointed. This is perhaps the heaviest and most insane album of the year, it’s mindblowing good. It’s primitive death/black metal with a strong war metal attitude, they’re usually in an insane crushing vibe but they can deliver on the occult atmospheric side as well (such as the start of “Graehence”). As expected, the drumming is super fast, the guitars are so loud and heavy that their sound just creates a loud but totally blissful and enjoyable mess. Sure, it’s repetitive but so is life, death is the only solution and these guys certainly kill everything they encounter.

Think of Adversarial but add some grind intensity, a more vicious attitude and an additional thickness and you wouldn’t be too far from what Altarage plays. Their music and their pummeling guitars are so intense that NIHL becomes some sort of trance experience that will nail you to your chair. Nightmarish music that would make our ancestors kill themselves out of fear. All hail nihilism, the Earth is doomed anyway.

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