#NocturnalSorcery 🇫🇮 The Holy Law in Total Ruin
3 min read
Band: Nocturnal Sorcery
Title: The Holy Law in Total Ruin
Label: Kvlt
Release Date: 19 August 2022
Country: Finland
Format Reviewed: High-quality digital recording
From Finland, I bring you Nocturnal Sorcery, and this is their first full-length album. From the first demo in 2014, a split album in 2017, and another demo released in 2019, this band has had some time to have the album up and ready for thirsty ears, and in my mind, well worth the wait.
Current band members are: Vorr on guitars, Genius of Perversions, also guitars, Vermis Trismegistos on bass, Epaluoma on drums, and Maledictus Vult, as vocals and also guitars. These 5 have put a lot of effort into this 9-track album, and in my reading about them, I came across a quote that sums of their philosophy on how they view their music. In their mind view, “black metal doesn’t need to progress to survive. Black metal doesn’t need to be more than what it already is-BLACK METAL…” There is no lessening of hate-filled coldness on display in this album, but more awaits the listener, some skillful tension building, instruments at the ready to explode into your ear chambers and enslave you to their throwback take on black metal.
The first track, “Ro’iheyav Ro’ihey Mihole Rem’oyav/Mephistophelean Wine”, slow, cold, intro, with icy notes from the guitars, then, the freezing frigid vocals bleed into that slow, arduous buildup and yeah, I’m in. Just this intro alone, and I’m in, don’t even need to hear the rest of this track (but of course, I will). This track is so coldly hate-filled and malevolent. Onto the second track entitled, “Blackhearted Angel’s Retribution”, soo cold, icy riffs, climbing up and then down, tremolos; precision execution. All of the Guitars are burning down my ears at this time, amazing. Drums are non-stop power blasts, and this vocal sounds like it comes from the freezing pits of some forsaken hole in the ground where survival is all there is.
The third track, “Fatum Nostrum (Damnatio Memoriae)”, yeah, I have no words for this: it’s just that fucking good!! The switching from slow to rapid, and the singing is from a coldly hellish frontier. The fourth track, “The Holy Law in Total Ruin”, demonic, pits of hell sounds (to me anyway) as the intro to this, incredible mood building extending to a place of total ruination. Brief and hellish and full of cold fury.
The fifth track, “Thy Primordial Flame”, uncompromising black metal riffs and drums that gallop across a soundscape of desolation. That takes us to the sixth track, “Through Boundaries of Time”, a continuation of track five, but more extension into the hell realm.
Track seven, “Down the Valley of Damnation”, some discordant keyboarding, wreaking darkness and despair to begin, to a protracted agonized scream that lifts the hair on my arms. That dark bleak expression to yet another pain/hate-filled gust of breath solidifies my mind, that valley of the damned would sound something like this. This expression of darkness is magnificently followed by track eight, “Miracle of Empty Hand”, which is a rampaging punishing riff and drum explosion.
The last track, nine, is “The Last Ray of Ihvh’s Light”, beginning with the beating drums that concluded track eight, filling in more of a sinister atmosphere as the music builds. Instrumental, thought provoking, grim-toned wall of sound.
The bass guitar work shines in this, with the lead guitars scratching out a place and punctuating the corrosive, mind-bending instrumental that is on display here. Some otherworldly tones are added to close out this mindscape of impending doom and destruction.
If Finnish black metal is your taste, from a band that believes in forwarding black metal from the past days of it, the first expression of it, then this album is one to check out. I give 8.5/10 Metal Marie
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8.5/10 To Greatness and Glory!
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