Oh dear, oh dear. What has British music come to? It seems all my friends can talk about right now is some bunch of rap-metal has-beens getting to number one, while rival Joe McElderly quivers his bottom lip for the tabloids claiming how offensive he finds said rival. Thank goodness, then, that there are bands like Sanctus Nex out there. Just as I was losing hope, I realise I don’t have to be entirely ashamed to be British. What’s more, building on an initial comment scrawled in my notebook; ‘could scare the crap out of a small child,’ last night a wicked little idea popped into my head – let’s lock our mealy-mouthed Tabloid darling in a darkened room with Aurelia cranked up full blast and watch him cack his pants! Now that’s entertainment!
In actual fact, the UK is producing some excellent black metal right now and Sanctus Nex join a host of other bands (Wodensthrone, Abgott, Skaldic Curse, etc.) in making a scene well worth getting excited about. While Aurelia, to a certain extent, appears to drink from the same pine-scented water as some of their fellow Brits, it lends only a very subtle influence and in fact they concentrate far more on creating an atmosphere filled with terror and foreboding; put simply these four tracks act like a soundtrack to the apocalypse.
At just under 6 minutes, opening track ‘Exordium of the Apostate’ is relatively short and sweet and most importantly it sets the scene beautifully for the following three tracks. Dark and brooding acoustic sounds compose themselves carefully, working to create an atmosphere so dense you could cut it with a knife. There’s an element of warmth surrounding the melodies which gradually unravel and crash-land into ‘Pursuit of Albion.’ Here is where the intensity certainly picks up with relentless drumming and layers of guitars that furiously thrash away while never straying far from that cold, calculated grimness. Deep, harrowing vocals contort within the cavernous mix, at times gnashing away with callous intensity that really fits the music well.
‘Held in Reverence’ leaps out with more ferocity than the previous tracks and while that numinous atmosphere is still present, it’s of less significance as the black metal riffs are bigger and bolder and the drums more brash. The bass projects a certain warmth here until we reach the midway point when we’re suddenly hit with a ton of feedback that causes one to sit up in befuddlement before being thrown down a bleak, joyless cesspool which trails out with a weeping acoustic guitar passage that suddenly becomes hard to predict. There’s a true sense of anguish to this in places, certainly in the vocals while the guitars equally play out with a depressive tone in places and if the apocalypse is nigh it’s a question who would actually jump early upon hearing this and who would let it play out. ‘Genesis Reversion’ spirals into a real vortex of blackened mayhem with the kind of bestial rasps that go straight through you, and as the album draws to a close this all kind of fuzzes out into a thin layer of distortion.
This is a fine debut album that I’d recommend to any fan of atmospheric black metal and is further proof that British metal isn’t dead (or is it?).
http://www.myspace.com/sanctusnexaurelia
