A few tracks from this found their way to us last year in the form of a demo and as suspected the artist is now releasing them on an album via My Kingdom. Luckily it is not a case of nihil nova as there are quite a few new tracks backing them up (sorry for resorting to Latin puns). As mentioned previously this is a martial industrial act and a solo project of Marco Kehren singer and guitarist of the now disbanded Dutch depressive doomsters Deinonychus. We don’t actually find ourselves sent a lot in this style which is a bit of a shame as it is one that I like a lot due to the militaristic nature of the music. You can theoretically march to it and dream to it and think back to past history as the ghostly sampled voices which replace actual vocals and take you back to past times. With a name like ‘Jupiter Temple’ and the Latin name of the band this is a history lesson that should take you back to Rome, a place where wars were frequent and bloody and the Emperors dictators in the extreme. However as I look into things and the varied samples suggest, this is not all about one fixed period of time but it’s “conceptually built around the terror and fear men had to suffer during many wars.”
Chorals and sombre tones and Teutonic samples lead us into the depressing sound of sorrowful ‘Nihil Novi Sub Sole,’ the drum beat rattles in a military two-step and this slow march if anything resembles a walk to the gallows. Having been in Bethlehem Marco is well versed in injecting suicidal pathos into his music and this is no exception, there is little in the way of jubilation here only loss. ‘To Enslave And Destroy’ is quick to emphasize this with crying greeting the harsh tones of the music, which is restrained to a slow delivery and sounds like the musical equivalent one may expect from incarceration in a Nazi death camp. At times this is quite like a soundtrack, although I can hardly imagine it being for a particularly pleasant movie as track titles like ‘Walking Over Mother Disease’ illustrate. Horns play a part here and with their mourning tone herald the destruction of nations and the crumbling of empires. The drumming may also have picked up a pace but this is still very bleak stuff indeed.
It’s only on this listen without any distraction that I realised just quite how depressing this is, the atmosphere it dramatically evokes is really evocative. This is not music to suggest to someone who is looking for a quick pick me up as it effortlessly flows around the spirits of the dead, the hopelessness of war and the misery of the multitudes affected by it. If you are looking for something poignant and unsettling this certainly hits the mark. Once this finishes it kind of demands a two minute silence to reflect on what you have just listened to and if you have one handy, laying a wreath in front of the stereo is not exactly a preposterous idea.
http://www.myspace.com/nihilnovisubsoleofficial
