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NOKTURNE
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By the way, this is a 2-disc set. It took me awhile to figure out why the second disc wouldn’t play in my stereo. Turns out, it’s a DVD with a five song live set. While I’m sure this is an awesome bonus for the corpsepaint kids, I personally feel that watching these guys thrash around in their make-up and longsleeve t-shirts detracts from the whole Satanic-panic aura. I mean, they kinda look like goobers. The drummer is even wearing a gasmask and one of those helmets that Shultz from Hogan’s Heroes used to wear. But that’s really a minor complaint, because the relentless sonic battering Nokturne lay down on the first disc is one of the hoariest, hairiest displays of pure hellfuck noise and black-hearted misanthropy I’ve heard since the earliest days of black metal. Lay down your souls, indeed. ________________________________________________________ |
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-Sleazegrinder |
Although
they sound like something cooked up in a mad scientist’s lab in
Transylvania, Nokturne is actually from Los Angeles. I am listening
to this unholy beast of an album as it tries to tear its way through my
speakers like some clawed demon, and I just cannot believe they live in
LA, with the goddamn sunshine and the supermodels. Perhaps they will sell
enough copies of this monster to move someplace colder and deader,
someplace more suitable for the unspeakable Kruelties and dark Kampaigns
they’re screeching about here. Fargo, North Dakota, maybe. Anyway, to be
blunt, Kruelty Kampaign is a masterpiece of raw, bloody,
American black metal. It will still sound like geese flying into a jet
engine to most people, but trust me, I know evil incarnate when I hear it.
Kaiser Drakon’s guitar sound is shamelessly wretched, a gorgeously
primitive, sub-punk grind that’s painful to listen to, yet impossible to
turn away from. It literally sounds like the dead rising from their graves
and writhing in the cemetery mud in exquisite, arthritic torment. The rest
of the band merely grabs onto the leathery wings of Drakon and rides the
brimstone whirlwind through an hour or so of thrashing, bashing, Satanic
gobbledygook. It’s fucking awesome, and it’s probably the most rock n’
roll black metal record since Immortal's "Damned in Black".
I fear the militant tone of their song titles (“Wehrwulf Bunker”,
“Blood Flag”) may be indicative of crypto-Fascist leanings,
so I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Nokturne, but on the basis of the
music alone, I’d say that fans of old-skull satanic metal will cream their
spiked codpieces over this.