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Nortt: Ligfærd
22/01/10 || Khlysty
It’s been quite some time, now, that I’ve been hearing pretty interesting things about Nortt, a one-man-black-metal project from Denmark. The buzz following Nortt like miasma has our boy mixing and meshing elements of trad black metal with doomish atmospherics and the sickest ambiance possible, creating a suffocating and pretty scary concoction. Well, after listening carefully to “Ligfærd” (supposedly, Nortt’s most “characteristic” album), I can easily tell you that our man from the beauteous land of blue cheese and Little Mermaid can come up with some pretty mean tunes. But, are they as the buzz wants them to be?
Well, actually, no. What we have here is six pretty longish songs (ranging from four to twelve minutes) of misery ambiance that use some of black metal’s staples (buzzing, lo-fi guitars, minor scales, some tortured screeched vocals buried in the mix) inside a doom framework of slower-than-mud rhythms and are peppered –or, better, slathered- with “illbient” noises, scrapes, scratches, howls and lots of other synthetic or synthetically manipulated sounds. Is it good? Oh, yes, fer sure. Is it scary? No way, José. See, maybe it’s my jaded fuck’s opinion, but, except very rare cases, music –even if it really wants it- cannot be scary –it’s fucking music, for fuck’s sake.
At best, music can work the listener up into a mood, if it’s done properly. Our boy Nortt is really capable in conjuring up sounds that create a uniformly funereal ambiance, full of darkness, pain and misery. It’s not scary per se, but it’s pretty engaging if one’s looking for music that will drown one inside a pool of almost fatalistic pessimism (you know, you’re born, life is shit and pain and then you die and face the torments of hell kind of approach). Generally, the sounds used here are of the spectral kind, like disembodied ghosts crying in a background of grey mists, with the guitars just adding a bit of crunch here and there.
The longer tracks have more pacing, while the shorter ones seem to play basically the role of codas into the atmospherics of the record. Generally, the whole record works like a horror-movie soundtrack and it could be used as background music for silent movies like “Nosferatu” or “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, since it’s quite moody and affecting. But, scary it’s not and if fans of black metal are looking for blasting, screaming and general dementia, they should look somewhere else. If, one the other hand, one’s looking for interesting music, informed by black metal and by ambient’s more sick extremes, “Ligfærd” is a really good record.
- Information
- Released: 2006
- Label: Total Holocaust Records
- Website: www.nortt.dk
- Band
- Nortt: all instruments
- Tracklist
- 01. Gudsforladt
- 02. Ligprædike
- 03. Vanhellig
- 04. Tilforn Tid
- 05. Dødsrune
- 06. Ligfærd
