Album Review: Nachtblut - "Todschick"

In the crowded landscape of melodic metal, it takes a lot to stand out from the pack.  It feels like there are new gothic bands emerging from the Norwegian fjords or the Schwarzwald every week, scowling with appropriate malice and looking for sweet validation.  Amidst a veritable sea of corpse paint, leather and blunt metal spikes, being able to claim a style that’s unique and viable is an increasingly difficult task.

Where Nachtblut has always excelled relative to their contemporaries in the cinematic nature of their music.  Which probably sounds impossible for a band that’s snarling their way through forty minutes of music, but Nachtblut is particularly talented at utilizing a tempo that keeps their music accessible to a larger audience.  Frankly, they might be the best metal act at this since Turisas (RIP.)  

The band really tried to hone this skill over the course of 2020’s “Vanitas,” which felt like a sleepwalk of an album relative to the thump of 2017’s excellent “Apostasie,” but it turned into an important record as it allowed Nachtblut the space to discover how to combine all of their talents into something more cohesive.

And all of that comes together for the new album “Todschick,” which offers something of a middle way between the two records that came before it.

The key to the whole thing, no pun intended, are the keys.  There’s nothing especially fancy about them, but the additional of a few simple key lines, ranging from the atmospheric to the dramatic, frames the entire experience of “Todschick” in the necessary cinematic light, especially when juxtaposed against the slow(er) pacing than most bands in the genre.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the single “Das Leben Der Anderen,” which is probably the closest thing the band will ever write to a ballad, but even as Askeroth gutturally screams his way through the track, the emotion in his voice becomes something palpable against the backdrop of the large, ready-for-primetime sound.

Nachtblut has another tool in their arsenal, more subtle than the simple cinematics, which help ground the band.  Their crunchy, hybrid guitar tone, part rock and roll, part early thrash, lends another familiar tone to the proceedings, all of which helps brings them home for the listener.  “Götterstille” is the foremost example of the guitar tone being an energetic but familiar base to the proceedings, but that’s just one of many - it’s a card that plays throughout the record.

No Nachtblut album would be complete without the requisite tongue-in-cheek piece toward the end and “Todschick” checks that box with the jaunty drinking song “Stirb Langsam,” which even if you don’t speak German (and I admit I only speak a little,) it’s easy to catch on the attitude of what’s happening, similar to listening to a Finntroll record…but, you know, German.

There’s not a ton to criticize about as far as the record is concerned, except to say that it’s good…and maybe that’s it.  There’s nothing that can be pointed to and said “well, they could have done this better,” but there’s also no songs that really become earwigs that sink their hooks in and make you reminiscence about them when the album isn’t playing.  Maybe that comes with subsequent listens - admittedly, it’s harder for an album to latch on when it’s in a foreign language.  Either way, Nachtblut has produced an album that is superior to “Vanitas,” and more on par from what fans have come to expect from the melodic metal veterans.