Nine Covens - ...on the Dawning of Light
Nine Covens is supposedly a super-group composed of British Black Metal musicians from more well known bands who have chosen to hide their identities. Why they’ve chosen anonymity is never clearly revealed. If you’re already in a Black Metal band and you and your pals decide to form a new band as a side project, why bother hiding? It’s not like this new group is a Boy Band or an attempt at reviving Butt Rock. Maybe they just like the mystery. That would make them kind of like the Black Metal equivalent of Mekong Delta or Brujeria. …on the Dawning of Light is the band’s second album. One of the criticisms that I’ve heard about this group is that they’re boring. I don’t have their debut, so that may have been the case previously, but …on the Dawning of Light is well played, excellently produced and even neck-damage inducing. The downer part is that I’ve heard most of this before from other bands. Everything about this record sounds familiar, though I doubt they lifted anything note for note. You catch yourself thinking that you heard a riff or hook somewhere before on a different album, and I found that to be pretty distracting. It took me several listens before I was able to look past all of it and just enjoy the music. On purely musical merits, this is a pretty solid album of Darkthrone/Mayhem inspired Black Metal. There is some good stuff in here, to be sure. One of the things that I liked was when Nine Covens added some dissonant guitar playing into their songs, using their standard musical instruments to boost the atmosphere, rather than go the Dimmu Borgir route and overload everything with keyboards. “The Fog of Deceit” was a favorite because of that and because they added some Traditional Metal riffing into the song. Another favorite was the instrumental track “White Star Acception,” because there was a lot of weird shit going on in the background. You can sort of hear it, but not too clearly, which drove me crazy initially. Nine Covens was fucking with my brain subliminally and I thought that it was both cool and disturbing at the same time. It was cool in that this is what the religious nuts always think that Satanic music is trying to do, and it was disturbing in that I don’t like it when people try to implant ideas or feelings into my head subconsciously. Though some may slag this as generic, Nine Covens has definitely produced a very listenable album. It isn’t the most awesome thing ever recorded, but it’s definitely getting a lot of playtime on my stereo.
(0) Comment(s)
Page 1 of 1 pages