Albums That Will #$@&%*! Your Face Off in 2014: Ninkharsag, TBA
Ninkharsag
TBA
Release Date – ???
Looking back at my “best of” list from last year, I can’t help but notice there isn’t any black metal on it. Sure, Deafheaven and Altar of Plagues are on there, but holy shit, they don’t count. I could be burnt out on the stuff, or last year could have been a weak (untr00?) year for it. I’m thinking the former: because of black metal’s ridiculous parameters, bands are pretty much fucked no matter what they do. Stay too loyal to the genre, people will stop caring after a record or two. Stray too much and you’ll cease to be a black metal band anymore (not that that’s a negative thing: remember how Ulver put out one of the best raw black metal albums ever and now sound like this?) It’s easy to think you’ve heard it all, and you heard it all ten years ago. Then a band like Ninkharsag comes along and expertly scratches a very grim itch.
The Liverpudlians (how a band can sound this aggressively Scandinavian and come from the Beatles’ city of origin is beyond me) aren’t putting too much of a spin on anything, but that’s the point. When they dropped their “Essential Salts of Human Dust” single on us last August, it was revelatory. Scalpel-precise, Swedish-style melodic black metal akin to Dissection and Dawn with some Emperor shrapnel embedded in there, both the song and its b-side “Liber V Vel Reguli” are packed with frostbitten goodness. It’s the kind of stuff that’s easy to do, but hard to do well. And every turn on a riff or minor key arpeggio is milked for every last bit of grimness, compelling enough to keep you coming back but vicious enough to avoid being dewy-eyed. Ninkharsag are the kind of band that rustles awake the beast who reminds you why you got into black metal to begin with.
Supposedly they’ve already written and recorded a full-length and are looking for a label to distribute it. So write your Congressman and see what they can do about that. In the meantime, you should grab what you can from their Bandcamp page. If you don’t like your black metal glistening in saccharine but not too in the raw, Ninkharsag are the guys for you.
