Nocturn is a young band from France, which blend symphony, Death Metal, Black Metal and many other elements in their music. The band’s debut album named Like A Seed Of Dust will be released on September, 1 via Sliptrick Records.
There isn’t much information about the band (or maybe I didn’t dig deep): the band was formed not a long time ago and recorded a three-songs EP. Then there were some changes in line-up and new, re-recorded versions of these songs were included in the debut longplay. That’s all I have to say about the band so let’s move to the album.
Like A Seed Of Dust opens with pompous symphony, which retreats soon by the onslaught of solid riffs and fast drumming of the first song “The Wraith In Bloodied Wings”. Music turns into Death Metal finally with the vocals – a rude male harsh. Symphony comes back in the chorus with female vocals. There are some Black Metal elements in the song also that add some infernal atmosphere, so generally this dynamic track sounds very interesting. The next “Pandaemonium” starts as a little bit ominous Symphonic/Power but soon it also turns to Death Metal, balancing between melody and brutality.
The titled “Like A Seed Of Dust” opens with some otherworld sounds but overall it is a melodic Symphonic Metal with typical “beauty and the beast” duo – male extreme vocals and clean female.
“La Belle” with lyrics in French suddenly starts with tough riff, lots of synths and electronic samples, taking the song somewhere to Industrial territory. However, in the middle of the track music gets some Power melody, which quickly changes with some Blackened Death and then with nearly Avantgarde Metal. There are lots of electronic samples on “Libernate” too but the main thing here is Thrash Metal with lots of headbanging passages. Nevertheless, in the end of the song music changes again: melody appears at first, then heavy guitars and the song ends as Melodic Death. Probably, this song has the most unexpected music twists in the album.
But something such musical variety plays a bad joke: “Under The Darkest Sea” also fluctuates between Black Metal and Symphonic but these elements change each other not so accurately and it doesn’t sounds seamless, while the elements themselves are interesting and solid. The same kind of thing happens in “Wasted Earth”: slow heavy intro, the pace increased, guitar riffs become brutal, drums go blast beats but suddenly you hear some electronic samples, more inherent to Industrial or even NDH, which change the evil brutality. A couple of such sharp twists really unset the listener, leaving him with the question “how did we get here?”
The ending “Odyssey” sounds unusually smooth against the other songs. There is some melody in it but mostly it’s a brutal track with good riffs and some keyboards on the background, which supplements the atmosphere and not set the tone for the song.
Anyway, Like A Seed Of Dust is a powerful, interesting, very diverse and sometimes unpredictable album, not without some drawbacks, of course. Sometimes a huge number of elements create an over-saturation and it becomes really hard to keep track of the music’s development. Also the twists and changes can be sharp from time to time so interesting and rich songs are not so impressive as they could be.
Such problems are not something new and inherent to many young bands: they try to impress the listeners and to show everything what they got, with their playing technique, songwriting and sometimes it can turn against them. But, like I said before, the album at large is interesting and Nocturn showed their huge potential. So I hope that the next album will not be long in coming.
Nocturn‘s facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nocturnband/
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