The black metal scene in Australia isn’t especially huge, but I’m fairly sure that whatever bands are over there that are any good, the musicians in Nazxul have had some involvement with. This band burst onto the scene with their 1995 debut Totem, and fourteen years later they return with their long awaited follow-up, which by the looks of it, has been in the making for quite a while. Of course there have been a few E.P’s and splits in that time so it’s not like they entirely went away. Sadly, Greg Morelli, one of the guitarist/keyboardists on this album, was killed last year in a motorcycle accident shortly after they had wrapped up recording.
So is this worth the wait? Well, difficult for me to say having just discovered the band but I’d guess the answer would be along the lines of yes. They have clearly gone for a sound that is both experimental and haunting and these are the vibes that come across from listening to this album. In places it’s all rather bombastic, especially on ‘Black Wings’ which has a touch of Emperor amidst it’s battle-raging blackness, while this also winds down into a fleeting shoegaze mantra that adds to the apocalyptic ambience. The steady melody gives you something to really sink your teeth into here. Title track, ‘Iconoclast’ similarly has quite a cosmic swagger to it while the symphonic passages are really spellbinding and have almost the feel of an epic film score.
The album follows a pattern that seems to rise and fall; it is broken up by four numerically titled instrumental passages (curiously ordered III, V, I, II) ‘V’ takes you along a dark path, which kind of allows the haunting miasma of ‘Black Wings’ to linger and build up an aura of suspense and mystery that suddenly erupts. Similarly on ‘II’ I feel like I’m being drawn through a black hole and the twilight ambience sweeps into ‘Symbol of Night & Winter (Ancient Lords)’ which rages forth with a kind of harsh, biting cold of winter. This sounds really dramatic and has a massive swagger thickened out with some mystical keyboard melodies. As the track progresses, I can feel myself drawn into a threatening, bleak landscape that shows no sign of life and where colour is but a distant memory, and things don’t look any brighter on ‘Oath (Fides Resurrectio).’ Again, this trails a foreboding fog across scenes of bleakness and destruction, as the only emotion that can be heard here is mass melancholy and devastation narrowly escaping the realms of doom.
The vocals here are callous and raw and with that underlying feel of desperation coming across in some places. Tracks like ‘Iconoclast’ build up a massive wall of bass and drums that show no mercy; the guitars are ice cold and overall this is really ferocious stuff that will fuck with your head. This is experimental to some extent, but the focus is on creating truly bleak, callous, unrelentingly harsh black metal that literally screams to be heard. Make sure you are listening.
http://www.myspace.com/nazxul
http://www.eisenwald.de
