Requiem Tenebrae
[Oaken Shield]

France has really impressed me lately with the number of great metal bands cropping up from their soil. Heathen Dawn, Diamond Eyed Princess, Aes Dana, Bran Barr, and Himinbjorg are some of my favorite bands that all call France home. Now I can add another to that list with Nehemah.

On their newest album "Requiem Tenebrae", they have everything to make just about any fan of black metal happy. At their core they are raw, fast and primitive black metal. While remaining raw, they opt to play in the slow to mid tempo range most of the time. Sure, they do build up to a hell-bent blast beating crescendo at times, but most of the time they rely on the slower and more powerful and melodic song structures to make one point to the listener: they are pissed off! Along with the rather melodic (yet raw) guitar parts and very timely drumming is some very respectable keyboarding. I know what you're thinking, keyboards usually don't sound right in black metal played this raw, but it works here. That's probably so due to the fact that the keyboard parts aren't a focal point of the music. They are always there flowing softly alongside the metal, but they are never out in front or making a more dominant presence over anything else in the music.

Speaking of being angry, this album contains some of the most vile and evil vocals I've ever heard done by their bassist/vocalist Corven! At times it really reminds of the vocals found on Mayhem's "De Mysterious Dom Satanas". Really grim and demented and seeming to spew forth hate with every word sung. Those vocals are commendable on their own, but they mix it up with a bit of clean vocal parts here and there. All the lyrics are written and sung in English, but I can't comment on what the lyrical content is about. More on that later.

The production is decent, but it could have been much better. It's a bit tinny sounding at times and the vocals are a bit too loud at points, but it's nothing that major. The drums could have been brought out a bit more into the front too, but that may well be fully intentional from the band. You never know anymore if a band is trying for a raw production on purpose or if it's just a plain old bad and/or unprofessional production. Either way, in the case of "Requiem Tenebrae", the tinny production is a lot easier to handle due to the great music.

The packaging I have a love/hate relationship with. The first problem I have is that the cover is very uninspired. It's just a very washed out image of one of the band members' face. Secondly, to get back to earlier in the review where I talked about the lyric content, while the lyrics are printed within the book, they are written out by hand and they are almost impossible to read. While that does look kind of cool on paper while you're looking at it, it kind of defeats the purpose of having the lyrics there if you can't read them, right? There are some positive points to the packaging, though. The piece of artwork that graces the middle part of the booklet is really nice and there are some full color pictures of the band in there as well. And TONS of symbols that I assume are satanic grace every page of the booklet. I'm not for sure though as I haven't been keeping up with my Satan 101 classes as of late.

When all is said and done, Nehemah's "Requiem Tenebrae" is a very worthwhile album to pick up for fans of rawer black metal. The few bad points I have about it won't be taken into consideration by fans of this genre anyway, so all is gold in their book. When raw black metal is played well like this where it's structured a bit so it still resembles music, I can fully enjoy it. I intend to keep a close eye on this band and hope that their next album sees them stray not too far from sound they have here on "Requiem Tenebrae". I kind of lost touch with this style of black metal around 1993 or so because a lot of the bands were just so unprofessional sounding and concentrating more on their image instead of their music. It's bands like Nehemah that are slowly bringing me back into the fold again.