Nox Aurea - Via Gnosis
Swedish doom metal band Nox Aurea, which features members of Rimfrost, The Cold Existence and Domgard, has just released their first full length album. The band is basically a death/doom/gothic hybrid, like most bands in this genre they use female vocals and produce a haunting atmosphere through the use of synths. This is of course the trend among these types of bands and Nox Aurea are real good at it but they are not likely to set the world alight with experimentation. They follow in the footsteps of many bands before them like Draconian and Swallow The Sun to name just two. What does set them apart from other bands with a gothic doom sound is they use a lot more death metal elements than most other bands in the genre even though this is essentially still a doom album. They also have a lot of shared duties on this album, there is 3 different people playing synths, guitars and bass along with 4 people sharing vocals. The album is a major piece of work at 72 minutes long so it is not a easy to listen to all the way through if this is not your style of metal. This album is made up of a series of interludes that act like fillers more than anything else but a couple of them are pretty good. One of them is "Night in Solitude’, which uses clean male whispered vocals, calming synths and acoustics but like most of the tracks on here, its too long. "The Funeral Of All" is the first real track on the album and stands out as being the most listenable tune on the album, listenable because it does not drag on too much even though its 10 minutes in length. Another good track is "Suffer" which features one of the better riffs on the album but the combination of male death growls and the haunting female vocals tend to sound confused and un-balanced. I think if they would have just stuck to one or the other, the overall sound would have benefited a lot. "Mother Alethia" is one of the better examples of the male/female vocal mix, the track starts off with one of the most haunting opening sections of music i have heard in a long time but unfortunately begins to drag by the 5 minute mark and then there is still another 7 minutes to get through. Once again i get back to the subject of interludes, there is just too many off them on this album. There is tracks that are interludes themselves and there is musical interludes contained within the actual songs. This spoil the flow of some of the songs for me as some of this album is awesome. There is some great doom riffing, haunting melodies and the powerful full production is faultless and when the female vocals are left alone to carry a song for a while, the effect is mesmerizing.But again the musical breaks provided a problem for me, i get the feeling that the band are capable of far better than simply relying on interludes to allow their audience time to adjust to the next epic song. There has been for a long time a sense of predictability to the death/doom hybrid and this band is no exception but then again you could say that about a lot of musical genres. There is nothing on "Via Gnosis" which hasn’t already been done hundreds of times before. Dual vocals, clean for both male and female, harsh growls typical of the death/doom scene, a melodic keyboard section and some crushing guitar sections. Lets face it, that sums up nearly every band in this field of metal but its not a bad album. I actually enjoy large sections of it but there is just too many interludes, too many occasions where a song will be building a nice riffing passage and then change. This is a album that if they were to cut out 20 minutes of filler and some of the disjointed male/female vocal work then this album would be one of the best ever released in the genre but the way it is, it just sounds like they had a real shortage of ideas but stretch the album out to 70 minutes anyway. I can still see a lot of doomsters digging this though, it just not what i am after right at this moment.
1. Opus Draconus
2. The Funeral Of All
3. Suffer
4. Odium Divinum
5. Nights In Solitude
6. Distant Stars
7. Lost Amongst The Earth And Sky
8. Mother Aletheia
9. Via Gnosis
Solitude Productions
Reviewer: Ed
Dec 22, 2009
Dec 22, 2009
Next review:
Funeral Circle - Sinister Sacrilege
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