Nocturnal Woods

What can I say, I dislike about 80% of anything black metal because of all the clichés in that scene/subgenre and quite often because the screeching vocals simply bore the hell out of me. And that last aspect is why I actually bought this EP and decided to review it.

I heard a song from this promo in a venue I was at and it grabbed my attention. Because of the vocals. All the separate elements on 'Nocturnal Woods' have 1995-1997 written all over them yet somehow because of the way they construct and combine it all, the band sounds fresh. It's that balance between familiarity and surprise which does the trick.

The vocals are in many ways early Anneke van Gierbergen inspired. And though Floor is not as good as Anneke, she does come bloody close. Yes, she's pretty damn good!. And now we have those vocals sung over black metal. Modern black metal as in both ultrafast as well as longer slow atmospheric sections, produced rather...unobtrusively.

The songs aren't very catchy in essence and it takes several spins to make the hooks stick in your mind and memory, the song structures are all over the place but it is the actual vibe of the music that does it here, despite the rather tame/safe unobtrusive production. The details constantly grab your attention, from the neat breaks in 'Onwards into the Abyss' to the fabulous high note at the end of 'Down from the tree'

The combination of slow melodic vocals over ultrafast (black)metal is something which I really like since Arkona's "Liki bessmertnykh bogov" blew my socks off in 2009. And that is what Neroth does pretty well (without sounding anything like Arkona) especially on 'Floods of Remembrance' which I consider the highlight of this EP.

Neroth are not the new Beatles of black metal, for that the songs are structurally rather messy and the spoken words parts are lacking but the vibe of the music and exceptionally strong female vocals really make me wonder how this band will grow and what aspects of their music they will broaden or narrow in the future.

I applaude them for not incorporating keyboards, else they could become some kind of female-fronted black metal very soon with all the extra clichés coming with that. It's also the already present clichés which temper my enthusiasm a bit. Like the standard bandlogo, artwork, used fonts, looking grumpy in pics. Maybe that's how the band tries branding themselves, presenting themselves as black metal primarily or whatever. All that stuff is just not my cup of tea. But their music is promising so I had to leave a short review to applaude them.