Album Review: Nachtblut - "Apostasie"

When you have music conversations with your friends, and you’re trying to get them to listen to a new band that you like and they’ve never heard of, you inevitably make comparisons, trying to find an analog to a touchstone that they’ll already know.  That analog can touch on multiple points, be it a familiar aspect of the band’s sound, style, appearance or genre. 

Some of them are easy.  Graveyard sounds like Led Zeppelin.  Midnight Ghost Train is similar to Clutch.  Turisas sounds like Andrew Lloyd Weber has an angry, metal-obsessed son.

Then comes Nachtblut.  It’s taken a while to come up with a proper analogy, but here it is – Nachtblut, and their new album “Apostasie,” lies halfway between Rammstein and Finntroll…both in musical sensibility, and in general silliness.

Before rumors start to swirl, let’s put this in its proper context.  That is a compliment.  Pure and simple.  In a year when it seems like the calendar is overly saturated with bands coming back out of the woodwork after multiple decade hiatuses, here’s a German band virtually unknown to American audiences that are putting fresh, personalized spins on sounds we thought we knew.

Addressing the other elephant in the room, as far as the silliness goes, maybe we’re reading this wrong and “Apostasie” is supposed to be as serious as a heart attack, but that seems unlikely.  If the Upstate New York public education system’s German curriculum is worth anything, some of these song titles translate to “Your Death is my Hooker,” and “Women De-boning,” so it’s hard to envision that the tongue isn’t firmly buried in the cheek here.

To top it off, if you skip to the end, there’s a truly excellent and highly enjoyable cover of the German rapper Kollegah’s hit “Wat is’ denn los mit dir,” which caps the album perfectly.  It’s a fantastic change of pace with some really bright keyboard work that stays within the envelope of Nachtblut while still showing an ability for musical interpretation.

Anyway, the meat of the album is an adrenaline-fueled, riff-heavy ride that will find a niche with fans across the spectrum of metal, as evidenced by the bands cited at the head of this thing.  There’s a lot of great design elements here in the construction, even if you can’t understand the German lyrics.  “Amok” rumbles with purpose and direction, but is flanked on either side by some clear piano and punctuated by a clean-toned guitar solo in the song’s second half.  The juxtaposition of the clean tones with the over-driven, screaming punch of the song’s basic riff creates a dichotomy that is simple, but adds a lot of depth.

As ever in this kind of effort, the keyboards can make or break an album by either accenting it or driving it over the cliff into contrivance.  Nachtblut employs the alarmingly bright tones of keyboardist Lymania’s harmonies to create real depth and help move the songs along.  “Scheinfromm” by itself is a powerhouse, but the electronic elements turn it into a more memorable, and thus more effective, song.

Not to be outdone, Nachtblut also gives us “Geboren um zu leben,” which for all its metal underpinnings, can safely be recognized as crossing the border into industrial, with its mechanized beats and heavy electronic influence.  The breakdowns and bridges are deceptively danceable, showing just another facet of what “Apostasie” brings to the table.

Listen, we’ve now spent three paragraphs distinguishing what some might call minor differences in affect or musical idiom, but being able to separate those pages and provide the listener with a handful of different styles while staying on message is what makes “Apostasie” so much more accomplished than many of its contemporaries.

A couple odd notes that have to be addressed.  If it were not for the soft piano section of “Frauenausbeiner,” an attentive listener may think that the song is a Germanized version of AC/DC’s “Have a Drink on Me.”  The basic riff, the structure, even the cadence is remarkably similar to that song from “Back in Black.” 

Also, the piano ballad “Einsam,” while executed well enough and highlighted by the emotive and earnest performance of guest vocalist Aeva Maurelle, feels a little out of place on the record, both because it’s sandwiched between a rousing arena-rock clone (as mentioned above,) and the beer-stein swinging celebration of the title track, and because as we’ve already talked about, there’s a question of seriousness amidst the bravado here.

Let’s not lose the forest for a couple of trees, though.  “Apostasie” is great.  One of the most purely enjoyable, catchy and consistently well-constructed albums of 2017.  It doesn’t require a lot of dissection to be able to understand what’s going on here; it’s a straight-ahead, rolling gothic metal record that knows how to be fun and punchy at the same time.  Especially as we hurtle inexorably toward year-end award season, you are doing yourself a disservice if you do not spend some time with Nachtblut.

Album Review: Beseech - "My Darkness, Darkness"

After a nearly ten-year absence, long-running Swedish goth metal band Beseech has reformed with three all new members and turned the machine back on, presenting the world with “My Darkness, Darkness,” their sixth studio record overall.  Having trampled a long and winding road through associations with different high profile metal record labels, Beseech is starting over only figuratively, continuing to produce goth metal in their same idiomatic style.

Now, goth metal takes on a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people, but in this case, we are speaking of the well-heeled roots of the genre, beginning with the romantic and theatrical tones of Bauhaus, before the genre even had a name.  Beseech, much like Finnish genre darling HIM, are concerned much more with creating the proper image and setting and atmosphere than simply using the label goth to shock or repulse.

So it comes as a refreshing change of pace when we are greeted with the solid downbeat and melancholy guitars of album starter “Beating Pulse,” a song that is concentrated around proper songwriting and craft in the goth paradigm, rather than dark clothing and brooding tones.  The song is bright without being chipper, like seeing a rainbow through a dirty window.  It’s properly laid out and executed with confidence.

The title track is a whirlwind of different influences and tones, incorporating some mock-country guitar for the opening, a piano riff that fits well in the pocket of the music and a pristine flow that leads to a hook-laden and memorable sing-along chorus.  It’s the album’s best track by leaps and bounds, the clear signal that Beseech both knows how to write songs and still has power and authority in their genre despite their long absence.  This kind of professionalism and expertise is dotted through the experience of “My Darkness, Darkness,” making for an album that is not bold, per se, but striking in how it creates plenty of feelings without needing a ton of bells and whistles.

There’s really only glaring drawback with Beseech’s record.  Which is, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WHISPERING?!  All the time!  The whole album!  It’s enough to drive a man bananas!  Like, okay, I get it: plenty of artists have used whispered tones with great success in their careers.  Blue Oyster Cult did it.  Clutch and Monster Magnet have both done it.  Danzig does it.  Marilyn Monroe famously did it for John F. Kennedy (first time Danzig and Marilyn Monroe have been in consecutive sentences.)  69 Eyes does it.  Rage Against the Machine.  Peter Steele frequently used his whisper as a contrasting agent, to make his harrowing bellow all the more profound.  The list goes on.  The issue with “My Darkness, Darkness” is that Angelina Sahlgren Söder and Klas Bohlin never emerge out of that fog.  In the end, it causes two distinct problem for the record, the first is that it never really feels like the wheels up and we’re off the ground – there’s an energy sap that’s persistent, particularly in spots like the repeated drone outro of “Darksome.”  The second is that a song like the title cut that we spoke about earlier, which is wonderful in pitch and color and cadence, lacks urgency and comes across like The Birds doing metal covers.

This is the kind of record that can make you want to bite your fingernails in consternation, because so there’s so much good here, but it’s marred by a single critical flaw.  Now, there’s an argument to be made that Beseech is simply sticking to their idiom, that goth metal should maintain a muted countenance, and sure, there’s merit in that.  Far be it from me to judge a band who’s been pounding pavement (off and on) for roughly twenty-five years.  But there’s also something to be said for innovation and flexibility and in this case, Beseech might just be holding themselves back from their best music.