Nachtmystium – Silencing Machine

This is why I’m listening to black metal music, because no other genre can shock you like this, at least the last ten years. Something like that is happening with “Silencing Machine” by Nactmystium. 2012 is the year with countless stunning releases with “Silencing Machine” being a part of them. The fact that makes this new record a masterpiece is that the Americans stopped repeating themselves and seem to leave the psychedelic attitude of the “Black Meddle” parts, returning to more raw and atmospheric music even more enriched.

The opening track puts you immediately in this character, with its dark riffs and the sick growls with many ambient elements that the band used to add in the “Black Meddle” parts. The most stunning part in my opinion is the self-titled song where Nachtmystium try a successful atmospheric experiment with a storm of tremolo pickings, sound effects and complex blastbeats. And this epic refrain with the guitars mixing a plurality of genres together, is what you need to become addicted with the new album. It’s hard to find a bad song in the record. Even the depressive “And I Control You” with the melancholic arpegio in the beginning and the slow tempo drumming plus “The Lepers Of Destitution” which is characterized by the same attitude, are affiliated absolutely perfect inside the album. The Meddle albums seems to have left an experimental legacy to the Americans because there’s not a single track with a taste of experimentation. “Borrowed Hope And Broken Dreams” is the second masterpiece in this treasure chest. Raw riffs and growls are inside a sea of ambient sounds, arpegios and melodies with the drumming following too.

Every track of “Silencing Machine” is a constant surprise and I guess that’s what makes it special. In “I Wait In Hell” the raw Nachtmystium from the first album are back and the tremolo picking melodies with the blast beats having often changes, both proving that. In the seventh song, “Decimation, Annihilation” the band plays an experimental old-school black metal, as it reminds a lot of Celtic Frost, but with the distorted vocals and some other sound effects the result is horny as hell. As the third masterpiece of “Silencing Machine” I can distinguish “Reduced To Ashes”. Very chaotic tremolo pickings with the usual Nachtmystium additions and all of these create a stunning atmosphere. With “Give Me The Grave” following the same experimental ways with the other songs and without breaking the album’s consistency or reducing the quality, the closing track, “These Rooms In Which We Sleep” comes for the final strike. Another song with a depressive introducing arpegio and full of ambient melodies that leaves us a beautiful melancholy for the end. Consuming, this album is incredible. A few bands can hold together the black metal rawness and the ambient experiments, with the band members bringing all of their experience of the past album and evolving in “Silencing Machine”. Someone can call it absolutely unorthodox or tweaked, but the truth is that it’s a bloody masterpiece.