Власть

N.K.V.D. are an interesting band with an interesting concept from France who play industrial black metal with strong influences from military marches and maybe a tiny bit of martial industrial influence as well. What the band set out to do is create a sonic atmosphere of totalitarianism that is cold, unfeeling, concrete-hard, oppressive, and ultimately terrifying. This is meant to sound hulking, big, and unnatural. Bottom line, what N.K.V.D. set out to do is make music that captures the essence and sound of oppression with all of the evil of such a state laid bare in the music. This should come as no surprise considering the name of the band is actually derived from the real-life precursor to the KGB who acted as the secret police and main spy agency of the Soviet Union, notorious for torturing, censoring, and killing those the state deemed a threat under Stalin. There's also the cover art which mashes Communist and Nazi imagery together, showing that brutal dictatorship is what this band is fixated on. Much like serial killers or demons, dictators have a way of inspiring a morbid intrigue that a metal band could easily capitalize on, and N.K.V.D. does so in a fairly novel way.

How N.K.V.D. does black metal is a lot like how a totalitarian dictator who is into the genre would probably do so, by mixing it in with his fetish for militarism and industrial might. The music may not vary by much, but what it does give you overpowers you in such a way that you can almost feel the black clouds of tyranny washing over the sky. The riffs on this thing are big, bombastic, loud, and serve to steamroll the listener with all of their loud, blaring might. It all sounds very martial, very imposing, and blasts as though it's coming out of a massive loudspeaker in a town square under military occupation. The machine gun-like drum machines rarely relent, and the guitars are an even mixture of monolithic and march-like meant to be as ominous and imposing as possible with the raspy snarls of the vocalist ringing out as if coming from a distorted bullhorn. This is the sort of stuff that makes for a very immersive atmosphere.

Granted, there is a problem with many of the songs following a similar formula of using a sample of a dictator's speech, terrorism, or some military chaos and then steamrolling one or two big riffs out until the end. Some variation could have done much more for Власть, making the songs much more distinct and giving us some more rousing, bombastic riffs and changes in tempo to make something that would take this interesting musical concept further. While the music is often similar from song to song, what we do get embodies its own purpose very well. However, I really wish there were more to this since it's a very interesting idea to combine military and totalitarian imagery so closely together with black metal. What riffs and atmosphere we do get are captivatingly crushing and feel larger than life with their slow pace and martial flair and it makes me a bit let down that there isn't more going on and that the music isn't more dynamic.

With all of this considered, Власть is solid, monolithic, totalitarian black metal that captures the essence of totalitarianism in their music. It's an original concept and holds together quite well with its iron fist method of rolling out punishing, immersive, and oppressive soundscapes with riffs that steamroll along sounding like the anthems to some insidious globe-spanning military regime. However, for how original it is, the songwriting is a bit too monolithic for Власть's own good and there isn't much on terms of motion or variation throughout and that could have made this into something truly special. However, this is the sort of album that finds its strength in chilling atmosphere and ominous militarism with the music providing a lot of raw strength. If you want to find a metal album that encapsulates the terrifying feeling of living in a soul-crushing, mighty police state, N.K.V.D's Власть is something to look for.

The idea behind N.K.V.D. is interesting if perhaps hair-raising for some people: the French industrial BM project's name is taken from the acronym for Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, the name of the law enforcement agency in the Soviet Union that carried out orders given from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and which was closely associated with (and at times incorporated) the secret police under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. The agency existed from 1934 to 1946, overseeing all regular police force work, firefighting, running the system of forced labour camps in far-flung parts of the country, conducting executions without due process (that is, obtaining warrants for making lawful arrests and allowing victims to go through the court system to prove their innocence), deporting entire ethnic groups from one part of the USSR to another, carrying out espionage (and political assassinations) abroad and enforcing Stalinist policies. (Thanks again, Wikipedia!) Fortunately or perhaps unfortunately this one-man industrial BM project is not so wide-ranging in its activities but is content for the time being to highlight aspects and episodes of our history in which absolute power and total control by one person or a few over people's lives and society existed. What that power and control might have felt like from the point of view of both the oppressor and the oppressed, the terror that such control evoked, and how that shaped society to the extent that fear became etched deeply into all its levels and might remain there permanently, ready to revive under the right conditions, even after the society thrown off its shackles and its people coming to enjoy democratic rights and freedoms, seem to be the dominant concerns of N.K.V.D. and its solo member, known only as LF.

N.K.V.D.'s debut album "Vlast' " (Russian for "power") does what the title says: it's an expression of power gone absolute and as expected this expression is right throughout the album. The music is based around rapid-fire machine-gun programmed tinny beats embellished with bass riffs of shock and horror, over which death-rattle vocals supplied by an unnamed Swedish guest vocalist detail the terrors of having your thoughts and behaviour monitored by unseen malevolent forces 24/7 and the punishments waiting for those who displease their governments. Recordings of chants, marches, crowd roars and speeches from known dictators and totalitarian governments of the past appear at critical points in most songs. The atmosphere throughout the album is cold, menacing and chilling indeed.

For all the care and attention that LF lavishes on the album's sound and atmosphere, the actual songs tend to sound much the same. Dominated as they are by flippy stuttering beats and repetitive looping riffs that tend to go up and down the scale, tracks segue from one to another like the variations on the theme they are and after about two or three songs, listeners' attention may drift and never catch up with the rest of the album. If each song had some distinguishing musical characteristic associated with the country it's meant to represent - unfortunately speeches or chants in the language associated with the country the song refers to don't help much if listeners aren't familiar with the countries referenced in question - the songs would be more identifiable and a bit more interesting. Different tunes, background atmosphere, moods, even a change of singers from one track to the next, could start off each track and eventually either fall away or merge with the punishing riffs and beats. The point would then be made that regardless of the country's history or culture, totalitarian power eventually has a way of levelling everyone to the same common denominator. The field recordings are not always clear and people unfamiliar with the various languages in the recordings can lose their way through the album.

I must admit I was relieved when the album ended - in spite of a good sound and a chilling ambience, the music does become tedious and uninteresting as it continues to the end.

First off, some venting of frustration is in order here: The first thing that comes to some people's minds upon viewing this album cover is probably something like, "Oh! Finally! Communist Black Metal! Now we have COMMIEBM to go along with our USBM, NSBM, N00BBM and KVLTBM." As if industrial black metal isn't a good enough description as it is, we can now conveniently find useless Wikipedia pages and YouTube tags dedicated specifically to REDRUMBM. Regardless of all that nonsense, the fact that Vlast is anything but an album dedicated to communism is worth mentioning. In Russian, the word "vlast" means "power, authority, dominion, control or dominance." In other words, alongside the group's recent EP Dictatura (which features the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic and Kadyrov on its cover), Vlast is an album both musically and thematically dedicated to ruthless domination and complete control.

N.K.V.D. operates behind a shroud of secrecy, as the only thing that is known about the duo is its French origin. All of Vlast's instruments and samples were orchestrated by a person known only as L.F. The vocalist on the album also goes by an alias (H.S.), but hints from Those Opposed Records tell us two things: 1. H.S. performs in a number of well-known Swedish black metal outfits, and 2. The man behind the mic isn't Mortuus from Marduk and Funeral Mist, as L.F. has mentioned directly that H.S. isn't a vocalist in his other projects. Needless to say, the vox on this daddy are beyond grimacing, and that's not the only thing...

The horrors of Vlast go well past the album's intimidating themes of world domination, as the onslaught of haunting industrial madness will ring throughout the listener's ears to the point of insanity. It's not only the head-on collision of ear drums and a massive army of riffs that blacken the album's atmosphere, but also the subtle usage of a lesser known tactic: disorientation. One key trait of any successful dictator is their ability to prevent the masses from organizing and forming an uprising. In this specific instance, Vlast demonstrates this tactic flawlessly, but therein lies its downfall. The album has so many chilling sound effects and so much atmosphere that it's no wonder that N.K.V.D. put more time into the sound of the album than it did the actual songs. Much like that on Negative Plane's release this year (yes, it's an odd musical comparison), the main emphasis seems geared toward the album's atmosphere rather than the album itself.

Vlast nears the forty minute mark, so it isn't too much of a chore to listen to, but the blatantly terrifying exterior that will initially enthuse most listeners will eventually wear off, as they will be left with what feels like an ongoing collective of scary noises. That's not to say N.K.V.D. doesn't deserve a near-perfect score for its ability to create something monumental for industrial black metal as a whole; but the overall product still leaves much to be desired. Even so, the French should stand proud knowing that they've received a very worthy new addition to the roster, spearheaded by this year's III (Aosoth) and parts I and II of the 777 Trilogy (Blut Aus Nord). À la vôtre!

Originally written for MetalReview.com