OR: A Micro-Essay of Questions About the Limits of Language in the Context of Reviews, Written While Listening to ORDER OF NOSFERAT’s Debut Album, Necuratul, And, Uh, Followed By an Even More Micro-Review of the Same Album
By Nathan Hassall
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We receive language not just through our ears but also through our bodies. Can you feel this sentence wrap its cold fingers around the curve of your spine and tug it?
Reviewing an album is a difficult task. Reviewing it adequately is impossible. Still, we who review, persist. Why? To promote an enjoyable album? To satisfy the ego by convincing others the experience of an album is worthy or unworthy of their attention? To spark conversation, debate, or hype?
Music has a way of flowing past the conscious mind and pouring straight into the subconscious. Ever sat in your living room, heard the first note of a song, and been brought to another place? Despite letting gravity pull your buttocks deeper into the curve of your cushion, your physical body is still (relatively speaking) in the same space—but the song transports you elsewhere. How come we feel movement and energy when our bones are still?
The simple answer may be that a song is comprised of particles, the collection of which creates atoms within us to reverberate at a different frequency. Sound comes from out there, and travels into us via vibration in the cochlea before alerting our excited neurons to buckshot across synaptic gaps. Our hearts flip how they beat, pores open and close, feet tap, heads nod, breath speeds up and slows. In other words, our bodies are engaged in an ecstatic and intricate dance even when we feel otherwise still. Music moves us: mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Why else would active descriptive language work so well when describing the musical experience to a potential listener?
Language is substandard when it comes to framing experience, but it’s all we’ve got. A quirk of the human mind is its remarkable ability to patternize a jumble of random sensory inputs and turn it into a story. Such a story gives us a sense of our continuity; a Self. Our brains narrativize what we experience, and this serves a social function: telling stories brings us together, and communication allows us—as social animals—to collaborate. We wouldn’t be here if our ancestors didn’t work together to hunt large beasts (or if the dinosaurs weren’t swept out of existence by a giant rock, leaving opportunistic primates the chance to inherit the earth—but that’s a story for another tangent). And here we are, dear reader, having a dialogue through a screen.
Whether it be listening to music or going out for dinner, our perceived reality unfolds before us, and we use it to tell ourselves who we are. We refine these stories by ruminating upon the image, symbolism, and emotion of events, repeating them, writing them down, refining them, and expressing them through different artistic mediums (in turn, leaving scribbles of our neuronal chemistry and blots of our molecular coding that’ll structure cultures generations from now). We often add new details to make our stories better (good old embellishment), and when our brains misremember, they fill in gaps for us to help our stories feel coherent—again to contribute to our narrativized self. We are even privy to holding entirely false memories in our minds: fictionalized narratives weaved by our subconscious that we believe are real.
So what happens in the case of music? Our brains’ similar ability to understand events through stories also allows us to understand intentional musical sounds and rhythms as elaborate narratives. Like any story, these sound-driven narratives have a beginning, middle, and end, we just call them songs. But we allow these songs to mesh together and accept the premise of many of them as a collective: an album. We know instinctively when an album achieves its overarching mission of synthesizing the convictions of the artistic practitioners and their listeners because it puts each of our minds in a place they weren’t before the music started playing.
It is, therefore, difficult to write an album review that is satisfactory: mix a jumble of words together to try to shade the inside of the head of whoever is reading it to such an extent it does the album justice. Writing reviews, to me, is like ekphrasis: a literary device that can stand to illuminate something about the art in focus, moved and dictated by the reaction to that art, but at the same time—and somewhat paradoxically—has nothing to do with the art if looked at in the creator’s perspective. The art doesn’t need the review, especially not aesthetically, but reviews may shape the aesthetic response. That’s why we can feel disappointed by overhype, the language of others (or our own) excitement can stunt our enjoyment of art. On the other hand, reviews and comments can also point out something we may never have noticed otherwise, and this can deepen our appreciation of something (it can also have the opposite effect.)
Does someone else’s description of a piece of art limit our experience and understanding, expand it, or cloud the otherwise clear waters of the work?
As a poetry practitioner (I don’t like the label ‘poet’—if you find that pretentious, I couldn’t give a flying fuck), I’m well aware of the inadequacy of language. But I’m also in awe of what language can accomplish. It amazes me daily how every word in every language is a symbol (or a group of symbols) made up of other symbols (letters). It baffles me how every word we utter or encounter is a form of alchemy—it stirs electrochemical signals in the messenger (speaker/writer) and the receiver (listener/reader). Is it any wonder that we use the term ‘spelling’? We conjure spells with our words, after all. Poetry is an extension of this spell, because the words are more deliberately incantatory than other artistic mediums of language. But music is a different beast; the spell cast is more primal.
Okay, okay. What we’ve established is that I’m a rambler. So what about the actual review?
Order of Nosferat’s first full-length album, Necuratul, is one of the best, emotionally-driven black metal releases I’ve heard in a long time. It’s so good, it rattled a previously dormant place within me so profoundly, I have come out of a three-year (or more) hiatus of writing (/ attempting to write) black metal reviews.
Sometimes, I listen to albums and scratch my head, thinking I need a few more listens to decide if I like it or not. When I hear albums like Necuratul, I realize how ridiculous spending time doing this is. Albums like these are clearly excellent work upon the first experience—and the music stays excellent with subsequent listens.
Can I frame my experience adequately using mere language? Probably not, but I’m not going to doodle my review with crayons. Not this time, anyway. So here it goes:
Necuratul starts with ‘Awaiting His Arrival’, a patient, ambient intro with keyboard piano and synth, complete with the nostalgic crackling of a dusty vinyl, referencing the dark sparkle of stars in the fire-breather’s smoke (from the front cover), with some buried spoken word at the end. It is a nostalgic nod to the spirit and glory days of 90s symphonic black metal. It doesn’t cover any new territory; its central topic is vampirism. So how, you may wonder, can it be so fresh when it’s so traditional?
When the guitars come in, they are raw and melodic in the typical vein of Finnish black metal. But there’s something more euphoric at play, and the album lifts up without sounding too ethereal. The synth dances in and out of the tracks, riding over the rhythm of the guitars, and drenches the listener with dream-like nostalgia. The tension between these instruments constantly pushes and pulls, sometimes even uplifting the listener into glorious spiritual realms. And the production is fantastic—the rawness is finely poised, allowing the sound to be, oxymoronically, distorted and clear. The piano has a neoclassical zeal that complements the harsher elements of the music and evokes a sense of yearning. And the drums are sharp, blasting, and full of dynamic cymbal play that waltzes between intricate and intense.
Sometimes, black metal can rely too heavily on capital “D” Darkness that it seems to forget to reel the listener in with an authentic emotional pull. But that isn’t true for Necuratul. This album strikes a satisfying balance of different moods, which gives it a strength devoid of so many black metal acts: emotional gratification. Words that alchemize in my mind while listening to this are triumphant, melancholic, hopeful, and impactful. It has plodding bass, purposeful guitarwork, substantial and intentional interludes that contribute to the album’s atmosphere—its elsewhereness—and never overstays its welcome. So what do the interludes do so successfully?
The interludes hold the black metal tracks together, and serve as threads that weave the album together into a symphony. They are purposeful, sometimes acoustic, sometimes dungeon synth, other times accompanied by a muffled kick drum. These calming passages happen before and after each black metal track. The interludes feel like backstories that give context to the next chapter of a novel, but they allow for pause, deeper understanding, and give the listener time to think about what happened before, and build excitement about what will happen next. This album, then, rewards the listener handsomely for their patience. As a result of these quieter moments, the black metal sections have a greater emotional punch that doesn’t give the listener the dreaded ‘ear fatigue.’ The album even revives an 80s Russian synthpop song, Alyans’ ‘At Dawn’, in one of their interludes—and it fits perfectly. In short, these passages aren’t something to be ignored—they make the album what it is.
At a time it could become easy to feel fatigued from all the raw and symphonic tracks emerging from black metal’s guttural underbelly. But this album proves that this style isn’t going anywhere just yet—nor should it. It demonstrates that raw black metal needn’t just transmit the power of darkness, anger, or melancholy; it can also be fun as hell.
Did I do this album justice? Probably not. Either way, you should probably go and listen to it.
Necuratul is available digitally now and releases physically 28th February via Purity Through Fire.
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Purchase Nosferat on CD, LP and limited A5 digipack from the Purity Through Fire webstore HERE, or digitally from the Order Of Nosferat Bandcamp HERE.
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