Nord...

If you want to make yourself truly sad, go get this album and you will see how many black metal albums that are not THIS ONE are completely laughable attempts at greatness, passion, dark romance and pure unfiltered metal music. This is one of those records that ruined my fucking life. Records that made me unsusceptible for so unbelievably many arms of art, culture, hedonism and self fulfillment. The debut album of Setherial has me rocking back and forth on a brittle bench in the forest where I gaze into the air and at the falling snow flakes like a small and helpless child. "Nord..." has three points in its title because after "Nord", there is only blind and deaf eternity. Setherial never even came close to their debut ever again.

This album would not exist like it does without the influence of "In The Nightside Eclipse" but it has found its own path despite using a lot of similar ingredients. But "Nord..." is a bit more down to earth than its brother, it is roaming through the thick virgin snow while the other one is riding the dark heavens. "Nord..." is so fantastically at peace with itself because it knows its own true worth like the back of its hand.

I do not miss a single thing on "Nord...". The production is exactly like it has to be to catch the pure maximum of energy and atmosphere, the high fertile screechings and salty grains of a young and stalwart winter poem with just the exact portion of morbidity are perfectly encapsulated by that seemingly chaotic but magnificently technical drum performance with a marvelous thick and authentic sound. The ride cymbals are banging away like the bells on a horse sleigh that is bringing new firewood for the oven. The riffs with their grandiose and rural magic of escapist horror tremolo and ice cold demon chords have the one and only timbre that I am willing to accept as perfect black metal guitar playing. The whole thing has an old and murky feeling but still cries in crystal clear pathways until your heart is reached and crushed. The vocals on "Nord..." are screams atop of screams, shrill, proud, hysterical and cool at the same time. An often unintelligible howling of an almost shattered throat that is as animalistic as it is human.

"Nord..." shall never return again because its times are definitely over. The sense of wonder and excitement, the mood of a scene that had just learned to stand on its own two feet, the mysteries of tape trading, the echoes of the eighties and the unsure future that no one had written, those were the days of "Nord..." and now they only live on in memory and in this record. A dumbed down generation of Tiktok-monkeys is incapable of creating something like this because its essence is as alien as it is lonely in its violent longing for ancient melodies and frosty serenity.