Nature Stays Silent

If you look on Northern Silence's website and check out the atmospheric black metal releases, you'll see a very nice selection there. Brand-new Swiss ABM act Cân Bardd has just joined the group with a new debut influenced by modern ABM acts like Saor and Caladan Brood. As a debut album from a fairly young BM project, Nature Stays Silent hasn't really departed yet from its influences, but the atmosphere of the tracks occasionally show promise despite a weird mixing job. In terms of noise level, this is pretty mild compared to some of the acts in the nature-BM repertoire. After some horns and flute passages, we get some blastbeats and croaked vocals, but founder/frontman Malo made the decision to bury anything about black metal as deep in the mix as he could contrive, occasionally giving the listener the sense of listening to a movie soundtrack on the main floor of a house with a black metal band playing a set in the basement. This is the more surprising because he opted not to use software and went with a human drummer instead, who does what he can within the constrictive mixing job to give a much-needed dose of black metal fury to the album. As for the tracks, listeners to Sojourner or Saor can guess some of what they'll hear. At the highest points of Cân Bardd's compositions, such as on Méditation Glaciale or Abîme, where the choruses get louder and more melodic and the guitars get heavier, it gets pretty good. The final track, A Gift For Nature, sees Malo turning up the guitars and drums a little, giving the track more power than most of the others. At the worst, you'll hear a lot of piano and flutes, with the metal hidden out of the way. There's more of the latter than the former, but everything's listenable, and every once in a while, you can hear the prototype of a good tune stashed away within.