Nightburn

Eight years after two promotional demos, and a lot of silence, out of the blue - or the black? - comes "Nightburn", the debut album from Finnish BM act Elemental. As the project name suggests, Elemental plays very minimal, stripped-down-to-the-basics black metal: grim, implacable, cold and confronting, straight out of the frozen wastes of the Arctic north. The music is very reminiscent of the work of legendary 1990s BM act Ildjarn, complete with unexpected headbanging grooves. The production on "Nightburn", though very lo-fi, is quite clean and the guitars and drums, and even the bass on some tracks, can be heard fairly clearly. Only the gruff, growling vocals might be hard to make out from the din, not that you'd want to find them after hearing the buzzing guitars and the unexpectedly catchy rhythms on songs across the album.

With two exceptions "Need" and "Senses Suddenly Alert", the eight tracks are mostly short pieces of repeating riff and rhythm loops. Even the exceptions each turn out to be series of repeating riff loops linked together rather loosely. The grinding aggression starts straight away and never lets go the scruff of your neck, holding your attention with booming drums or complex percussion and near-danceworthy rhythms on early highlights like "Nightburn!" and parts (especially the middle part) of "Need". About halfway through "Need", we get a riff and rhythm structure that might remind us of Elemental man Atvar's other, more regular (and more famous) BM act Circle of Ouroborus. The sullen bile and aggression continue into the latter half of the album though there still are indications that behind the lo-fi BM distortion lurks a party-going beast dying to burst out a few dance moves.

"Victor" and "Aeolian" have a completely different if colder and slightly groovier sound from the other tracks, as though they were recorded at a different time. They are much faster and switch riff loops more sharply as well. The bass can be heard to divert a little from the other instruments on parts of "Aeolian", and this tendency continues in the last track "Through the Earth to the Stars". At last, we also have a better idea of Atvar's vocal style - a very cold, spine-chilling and guttural style it is, too.

Those still mourning the day Vidar Vaer closed curtains on Ildjarn will be happy to learn that there's still much to mine in his niche of minimalist, neo-primitive BM riff-loop aggression, and of all people, Atvar (of Black Stench, Circle of Ouroborus, Keres, Rahu, Venus Star) has been working that vein and finding much treasure in it. True, a lot more could have been done with all those riff loops and rhythm textures to turn them into songs but this would have been well outside Elemental's scope. It's arguable that the music on this album may not be so enjoyable either if it had been turned into more complex works. As Elemental demonstrates, less (and even less) really is more (and even more).