Review Summary: Demented, delirious and a pinnacle of the Blut Aus Nord sound.
While kick-starting its journey in the mid 90’s with quite a clearly traditional old school black metal temperament, French project
Blut Aus Nord quickly evolved into its own, completely unique beast by creating a rather particular, scary and often intimidating musical world. More than two and a half decades and a few local minima / maxima later, the band has proven to be fearlessly experimental, challenging and doesn’t rest on its laurels for a second.
Disharmonium: Nahab is the second installation of another
Blut Aus Nord conceptual trilogy, following
Memoria Vetusta and
777, revolving around no other than one of the forefathers of horror fiction, H.P. Lovecraft.
You’re right if you’re gasping in frustration thinking this is yet another tribute to the legendary writer, but I will come forth and state that there is no other band out there that can hone nightmarish soundscapes, as vividly as
Blut Aus Nord can. With that in mind, what Vindsval and the crew initiated last year with
Undreamable Abysses, is now re-iterated but magnified one thousand fold and reaching new dimensions of aural madness and terror.
Nahab has such a massive, crippling atmosphere, with incredibly haunting guitar lines and terrifying vocals, that it feels like a new monster that grew out of its first sibling incredibly fast and well out of proportion.
All the longer pieces of the album are close to close to perfection, absolutely expressing the demented nature of
Blut Aus Nord in the best manner possible. In between, drone / dark ambient passages named “Hideous Dream Opus” 1, 2 and 3, serve as connecting points in the album, as it has been exercised by the band before.
Nahab, after its short introduction, opens with the blasting banger “Mental Paralysis”, which accurately describes what it feels like to go through this mammoth of a record, and it quickly demonstrates how much the material has expanded and even evolved, since last year. From then on, it will be the most pleasingly anxious roller coaster you have ever been on, with one track dragging you deeper than the previous one. After a few excellent tunes, “The Ultimate Void of Chaos” is maybe the most unsettling to listen to, and the album concludes in full blown hysteria with “Forgotten Aeon”.
If you’re familiar with the sound of
Blut Aus Nord, then the album will come as no surprise to you. But if you’re a fan of that sound, prepare your mind to be completely blown away by a band that currently seems to be at a peak in terms of inspiration and compositional vision, in a way that it hasn’t been for a while now.
Nahab is to me, much more convincing than anything that they have released since 2014’s
Saturnian Poetry, including the already magnificent
Undreamable Abysses. This is the
Blut Aus Nord we love, and this is how this band sounds at its best. It’s been a while since they have released something so crushing, and it feels like this new trilogy will go down in history as a part of their discography that contains some of their best works. The first album was just a teasing treat in front of this behemoth, you’re not ready.
