Carpe Noctem – Vitrun
2 min read
Band: Carpe Noctem
Title: Vitrun
Label: Code666/Aural Music
Release date: 6 October 2018
Country: Iceland
Format reviewed: High Quality Digital Promo
CARPE NOCTEM is a band founded in 2005 in Reykjavik and being defined among the rising Iceland leading acts in black metal. Intense, extreme, really apocalyptic, with Icelandic lyrics on the Norse mythology, occult writings, apocalyptic prophecies, and Icelandic black magic rituals.
Having a self-released a demo “Myrkraverk” in 2008, an EP called “Carpe Noctem” in 2009 and a debut full-length album – “In Terra Profugus”, released in 2013, now the band is back with their second album, titled „Vitrun“. Yes, it comes five years after their previous release, and it carries huge potential to turn around the idea for black metal of one.
“There is a hidden key at the heart of every nightmare. Vitrun – a revelation, a vision. Vitrun explores the liminal space of the surreal and mundane. Everything is taken and nothing is freely given in return”
The album is cold, distant, winter. Intense. With very much distorted, crying guitars, rotten chords, adding much a hypnotic feel in the overall fatal apocalyptic grandiose. The release contains six magical songs, bringing over the greyest skies and the most storming clouds. “Vitrum” is a portent of darkest winds blowing over the snowy mountains, raising the spirits of the ancient ones in a ritualistic danse. So raw, that the listener drowns and looses himself into the swirling snow. Pain, suffering and cacophony.
I must admit that I was really impressed while listening the album. Being into the black metal spectrum, the band brings some very interesting ideas. Again I will emphasise on the distorted guitars, solos, leading to high crescendos of chaotic swirls and hallucinations. Those ambient esoteric parts and tense melodies. The changing tempo – from calm lunatic chants to schizophrenic blasts and screams. I dislike making comparisons but I would probably mention here some sort of combination of Ulcerate and The Ruins Of Beverast in order to describe the album. However, is it possible a real NIGHTMARE to be described?
Definitely Carpe Noctem deliver among the finest black metal records of 2018. Extreme, heavy, diverse, full of cold. No carnivals on stage, no circus, clowns and slapsticks. Just pure music coming for heart and the very depths of North. Music carrying that feeling of distant time and immense snowy lands. The eternity and the immortality, the night skies and the freezing stars. I do recommend “Vitrum”. You just deserve listening to something really good. 9/10 Count Vlad
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