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Underrated, undettered, and unstoppable, Azentrius's mighty Nachtmystium has unleashed his most powerful release to date. Instinct: Decay, released on Battle Kommand records, provides the best soundtrack for despair, destruction and just pure hate. Demise, the last Nachtmystium official release back in December, showcased a band experimenting with much more depressive themes. Sending the listener into a slow paced descent into a desolate psychological hell. Instinct: Decay picks up right where Demise left off. Continuing with slow tempo beats and thrashing in with fast blast beats that echo in your head.
The ongoing theme you get from the album translates perfect with the music. Complete human self destruction. Azentrius has zoned in on the perfect sound for Nachtmystium with Instinct: Decay. Using alot of different instrumentation to give off that perfect sad but uplifting feel. A main example of that is on the opening track, A Seed for Suffering. After a despondent, trance-like intro, the song crushes straight in with Azentrius giving a harsh yell to open the album. And after the 3 minute mark hits, a beautiful acoustic passage is set in. Quickly returing to full electric madness. With a mind bending guitar lead in the background that plows through the head of the listener. This sadistic formula is used throughout the album in great doses. Instinct: Decay also has it's fair share of harsh, raw black metal anthems. A main one is Antichrist Messiah. Beginning fast and in your face with the altered demonic vocals to accompany the song. Azentrius work in Twilight seems to have influenced his work and that reflects greatly upon this song. Imperial's thundering bass work and Azentrius vicious guitar leads make a great collaboration on this album. Azentrius's vocals have also gotten better on this release. The production on the album does a great job of not having the vocals not to far back in the mix but also not to upfront where they overshadow the music itself. When hearing Azentrius scream, "I want to be the hands around your throat" during Here's to Hoping, it gives you a good impression of how he feels about his enemies and the human race altogether. The unbalanced and disharmonic parts throughout the album gives it that much more distant, cold feeling. The intros and outros also showcase that. Highlighting a good use of keys, far out guitar leads that make me think of pink floyd turned black metal, and riutalistic drum beats. I wonder if acid was used in the making of these parts because the songs feel like a complete acid trip. A great way to balance out the harsh, furious speed on this album. The layout of the album is very somber in tone. A dark blue covers the front cover with the image human head with it's skull cut open to show roots slowing growing out from inside. These roots continue throughout the albums inner layout. Words of hate and despair are shown inside. Not lyrics but just thoughts from a misanthropic viewpoint. A deep inner madness in the human mind. The best so far in my opinion. Azentrius has came out with a masterpiece of despondent, eerie black metal. Highlights on this album for me have to be The Seed of Suffering, Chosen by No One, Eternal Ground, Antichrist Messiah, damn I might as well list them all because each individual song is great on it's own right. A superb release for USBM and black metal altogether. | |
