A Nocturnal Emanation

A Nocturnal Emanation consists of a single 24-minute track from one-man black metal project Zalmoxis. It's moody and discordant at the start, though halfway through it starts taking on more traditional hallmarks of black metal such as tremolo picking and blastbeats. As the drumming starts, faraway chanting starts up to clattering guitar, building up to a echoing, repetitive mountain of sound. Yet it doesn't stay that way. Entheogen's tortured screams give way to clean vocals and more melody with some post-punk influence as though the shattered mess the track was reduced to could be repaired by the cold discipline of Midnight Odyssey-style gothic dreams. The combination is incredibly effective and pulls the listener in, as it builds to a crescendo of hammering blastbeats and increasingly layered guitars. Eighteen minutes in, the guitars cut out, the volume gets turned way down, and in the background is a droning electronic hum; a minute or two later the guitars return and everything plunges into chaos once more. A long description considering this is one track; but then, it's really four, maybe five songs woven together. I was pretty impressed; even with some influence from other established ABM greats, Entheogen succeeds in putting his own stamp on this rather ambitious first EP. Bandcamp: https://zalmoxis.bandcamp.com/.