Offering a tight iteration of cutting, riff laden black metal, the debut album from Nigrum succeeds in spite of – or rather because of – its notably modest packaging. Sharp interweaving guitar lines flow across these tracks with sophisticated grace, but the presentation is one of immediacy, intimacy even, a garage band working themselves into a frenzy of punk driven black metal of a classically evil shade. But it is no less sophisticated for this DIY ethos, delivering complex rhythmic and melodic interplays unfolding in microcosm and at great speed, producing macro narratives supervening on these atomised particles of biting, ritualistic aggression.
The production on ‘Elevenfold Tail’ is still polished enough to do justice to the dense riff tessellation at play here. The drums are perhaps a little quiet, but the constant reshuffling of patterns and rhythms is easily discernible. And the cavalcade of crash cymbals and flowing rolls does its job in unsettling the musical centre, allowing a constant sense of chaos to pervade without ever fully losing control of the musical direction. Dual guitar lines are thin and tinny, but cut like a knife across the mix, delivering sharp, well defined hooks and melodic licks, stitching together the longform narrative riffs with additional clutter. Vocals are a harsh, distorted bark that would be as at home on any blackened thrash album as they are in the mystical context found on ‘Elevenfold Tail’.
One is reminded of Ultra Silvam for a comparable contemporary artist that employs a similar interplay between microcosms of clutter that nevertheless give rise to supervenient meta qualities that float atop the ground level chaos, articulating lasting statements of melodic and philosophical intent. At times disjointed and angular, as on the track ‘Eleven Feathered Tempest’, but largely galloping past the listener’s ears with traditional melodic techniques that gain their abrasive qualities from their sheer density and speed.
Nigrum use a superficial grounded immediacy as a trojan horse, deployed to smuggle in a sophisticated and many layered identity as broad as it is single minded. ‘Elevenfold Tail’ achieves that rare thing within explicitly riff based black metal (over atmospheric), a plethora of raw material thrown at the listener, but this apparent chaos is only skin deep, beneath the surface it is marshalled into a remarkably focused, premeditated, fully bureaucratised system, delivering its message of bacchanalian revelry in exactly the manner in which the artist intends.
Birthed in the heat of Mexico now residing, fomenting, in the ice of Sweden, four-piece orthodox black metal band Nigrum combine the balanced elements of black metal’s core essence, combining them into Elevenfold Tail; an album steeped in the most ancient of mystic auras.
This is cruel, nasty black metal born of the malicious occult, wielded with deliberate aim and formidable potency, conjured through slowly built ritual for most censorious psychic damage when its full potential is unleashed. Eight full tracks, with prologue, epilogue and necromantic haunting, this release has been brewing since the bands’ inception in 2016 over a demo and two EPS, and now fully realised in album form.
The spiritual and creative processes that guided Nigrum culminated in, and were crowned by, the recording of their debut album. Titled Elevenfold Tail, Nigrum's first full-length strike is a serpentine one: clear and cutting in its cunning, but given to hideous energies that always threaten to bubble over into hysteria. Nigrum's black metal here simultaneously sounds vintage and modern, with foundation stones faint - both North and South reside on their compass - and no trendiness pursued for cheap absorption. Rather, Elevenfold Tail unlocks its secrets slowly, subtly, almost sensually...although, again, that elemental fire is always burning and always threatening to consume the listener. As such, Nigrum's songwriting and execution both put a premium on delayed-gratification dynamics; aura and atmosphere likewise exist in (dis)harmony with that songwriting and execution, coalescing into a cob-webbed, bug-eyed album-length experience. The ritual dagger flashes, and seals your fate..
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