Review by Sandre the Giant
The kind of music on the new Noltem album ‘Illusions in the Wake’, is not the kind of music you’d expect with such a vibrant and almost psychedelic album cover. You’d be forgiven for thinking prog, maybe a stoner doom record, but it’s unlikely you’d guess atmospheric black metal. But confounding expectations is becoming an artform at Transcending Obscurity Records, who are putting this record out in October.
Opener ‘Figment’ is a powerful piece of music, full of massive soaring melody and a vast soundscape peppered with a keening roar. When teh delicate acoustic comes in, the song evolves once more into an almost folkish black metal sound, led by a melancholic atmosphere like a weeping rain. It swells and builds towards this glorious crescendo where the crashing of waves fades into the sound of a bell ringing, but a bell in a discordant universe. The sweeping title track is lush and thick with almost prog metal riff patterns, and even when the more ‘traditional’ black metal tremolo riffing returns the spacious prog atmospheres remain.
‘Beneath the Dreaming Blue’ opens with some polyrhythmic drumming building into a melodic and monstrous slab of melancholic black metal. The base of every song is thicker and denser than a lot of black metal, but you can’t fail to notice the influence of Agalloch or Saor when it comes to their black metal chops. It feels SO melodic and yet never seems to be anything other than heavy and dark. That’s an art. I lvoe the delicate movements of ‘Submerged’ as an interlude, a place of peace between the weight. ‘Ruse’ is another grandiose masterpiece; a song that is so massive in scope and scale that you can barely grasp all of it in one listen. As a debut full length, the music here is almost peerless in 2021 when it comes to this style. Closing with the folk influenced power of ‘On Shores of Glass’, it has been an exhilirating ride.
I wasn’t sure what to expect with this record; black metal with folk elements shrouded in a technicolour album sleeve and yet somehow that all comes together in the finished product. There is of course a heavy black metal influence, with soaring atmospherics and Cascadian riffing flowing through everything, and of course that snarling vocal. But there’s a lot more going on under the surface. A huge amount of additional elements, like piano, that really add subtle twists to what Noltem are doing. I love this record, and hopefully you will too.
https://www.facebook.com/noltem
https://noltemband.bandcamp.com/album/illusions-in-the-wake-atmospheric-black-metal
https://www.facebook.com/transcendingobscurityrecords
The Killchain 