Noirum - Nature (2025)

Country: Czechia
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jan 2025
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Here's an interesting album that's hard to categorise. I'm going with avant-garde black metal, as that's what the Metal Archives list and it's certainly grounded in black metal. Forests, Darkness and Sorcery opens up the album with a wall of sound guitar and a shriek in the vocals. The question is whether what else they do counts as avant-garde or just inventive. It seems entirely accessible to me, for extreme metal, and that's no bad thing. Does avant-garde have to mean challenging?

Some of it departs more obviously from black metal than the rest, but even there it's not always a wild shift. Sure, Jotunheimen goes to some interesting places that we wouldn't typically associate with black metal. It starts out with soothing Slavic folk chants, with a slow bass and slow keyboard melodies, not to forget a wonderful percussion sound. The vocals and percussion are manipulated later in the song so that it almost feels like a Kraftwerk compsition for a while. That's not a usual sound for black metal, even though it works well.

But Arctic Swamps often sounds like Celtic Frost, slow doom metal with prominent note bends on the guitars. It's still really heavy stuff, even if it feels like a sound that predates black metal in its current form. There's a proto-extreme thump on Eternal Snow that hints at thrash and industrial but it morphs into more recognisable black metal often enough. Deep Lake under the Moon kicks off like S.O.D. and it and Sólardauði both have mosh parts that I'd expect from someone like them. Wanderers has an epic swell over the black metal flurry. There are plenty of side trips into other subgenres here but they're all pretty compatible with black metal.

So avant-garde may be a stretch, but it's definitely black metal with an open mind and that's been my favourite type of black metal since it found a name. It never ceases to amaze me how it's gone from a fundamentally restrictive single bleak sound to arguably the most versatile genre in all of metal, venturing into all sorts of musical territory that I'd never have imagined would welcome it back in the late eighties.

Jotunheimen aside, this tends to do it subtly, like a neat psychedelic section late in Sólardauði it's easy to miss if you're not paying attention. The harmonising vocals in Wanderers aren't missable, but there are nuances there that are. It's cleverly done. There's a complete drop midway through A Lone Tree that serves as wonderful emphasis, and, of course, the accompanying ramp back up to full gear. All these are worthy touches that highlight the strength of the songwriting.

The most overt example of something different, Jotunheimen aside, has to be Eternal Snow, which continually reinvents itself. It starts out proto-extreme and never quite ditches its industrial vibe but somehow finds its way into a jagged jazz section and back out again in a spacey swirl that feels almost new age. It's a constantly inventive song that keeps us well and truly on the hop. Somehow it doesn't end up on my favourites list, because that's the sort of thing that usually grabs me, but I prefer Jotunheimen for diversity and Wanderers for sheer groove.

Oddly, there seems to be less to say about this than I expected from a band labelled "avant-garde". It's a strong album, certainly. I've listened through this a bunch of times over a couple of days and nothing's got old yet. The musician responsible for most of it goes by VlastYs, whose usual credit is for "everything". However, I see a second guitarist, Martin Vymětal, who joined a couple of years in and is apparently still involved. I couldn't tell you which guitars belong to which musician, but it seems like a pretty safe bet to assume that everything else is VlastYs, including the songwriting.

I like this a lot, albeit a little less than I did on a first listen when it felt more groundbreaking. It is imaginative, for sure, but I have to wonder if this is more accessible than the previous two albums, which weren't generally labelled in English. Nedráždi Moniku harmonikou and Pusťte netvora do otvora are pretty much entirely in Czech, I believe, with perhaps an odd shift into other languages for tracks like Auris artifex or Vindaloo. Oh, and Bikini Hardcore, which doesn't sound close to the sound this band has. Certainly there were female vocals on the first album but not here.