Nattfog - Mustan Auringon Riitti
Ah, Finnish NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal, AKA “that Nazi shit,” for those who haven’t heard the term before). It’s easy to tell that this is NS because of the sunwheel designs on the album cover. Once you know what to look for, it’s easy to pick out an NSBM band even when the so-called “politically correct” record store claims to not stock any of that shit. When I first threw this on, I expected something more in the style of Graveland because the intro track had a very Slavic Folk air to it. However, once the intro was over, the Graveland influence fades into the background and the Burzum influences take center stage. The Graveland influence comes back here and there but not until the last track does it shine again. The music is fairly minimalistic and melancholic and chugs along at the same mid-paced tempo in the way that Burzum sounds. This didn’t surprise me very much. NSBM in general owes Varg Vikernes so much in terms of influence that he should be getting royalty checks from every skinhead this side of Siberia. Nattfog’s music is competently executed, but their weakness is in their production. The vocals are buried, the drums are too loud and the guitars need more bass. I imagine that the guitars wouldn’t sound too bad if they weren’t constantly getting drowned out by the snare and bass drums. If there had been a drum wanker behind the kit, I could understand why this would be the case, but the drumming isn’t technical at all. In fact, the first song had such basic, robotic, drumming that I thought I was listening to Techno/House music. The drum patterns don’t get much more complex than that throughout the course of this album - and with the drums being so loud, you can’t help but notice that. Like so many others in the Black Metal genre, this band could greatly benefit from a studio engineer that knew what he was doing. I’d honestly like to hear this album with a better sound just so that I could hear what they’re going for properly. I caught some clean vocals buried in the title track, but I really had to listen hard to even hear it at all. This could have been a better album, but most of Nattfog’s issues would disappear if they had a competent studio engineer to give them better tones and to mix things so that the drums don’t drown everything else out.
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