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ALBUM REVIEW
- Nazxul - Iconoclast
- Eisenwald
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- Australia’s Nazxul have long
operated a policy of not rushing greatness. It has been fourteen years since their debut
full-length, “Totem”, which so
impressed with its sense of monumental atmosphere, and willingness to break ground, and
there must have been fans who have ticked off every slow, painful day until “Iconoclast” was finally in their
miserable hands. That the creation process that brought about this album has stretched out
over a decade is not reflected in the final listening – this is as coherent and full
a recording as you could every hope to hear.
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- After the ominous strings of “Apoptosis” set a fraught yet rich tone
which persists throughout the album, the majestic “Dragon
Dispitous” gives an unreserved show of what Nazxul are capable of creating; an
incredibly grand yet noisy and textured sound is teased with discordant shapes, battered
into subservience by Luke Mills’ almighty snarl of a vocal, before finally opening up
into something immensely atmospheric. Nazxul pick up Emperor’s torch, and give us
back the thing that Dimmu Borgir broke – a ‘symphonic’ black metal with
real teeth, real balls, real integrity and a real ability to overwhelm the senses and
cloud the mind with anguish and aggression.
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- Scandinavian references do us no
good, however, and this album is too much a piece of art to be dissected along the lines
of a scene’s trends. A series of instrumental interludes – low, breathing synths
at “III”, the burning of an industrial
wasteland at “I” – give the sense
that the effect of this album on the listener has been imagined as a whole. In viewing the
running order, I had a feeling that there would be a fantastic climax in the final third,
and I was not far wrong; it is here that “Oath
(Fides Resurrectio” is located, with its quasi-religious beginning, slow,
gorgeous, symphonic developments, surprising major key outbreaks and eventual slow descent
back into strings and chanting. At the risk of hyperbole, I’ll say this is one of the
most immense, rich, frightening and dangerous symphonic black metal tracks I’ve ever
heard.
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- So many years living with your own
hype would crack a lesser band; in the case of Nazxul, it has made them more ferociously
determined to be difficult, surprising and creative, to live out their belief that
“the underground will never rise”. Muscular, epic, driving and rich, “Iconoclast” is an album of both
unexpected beauty and shocking dissonant spite. It’s searingly ambitious, but it
doesn’t give a fuck what you think. And that’s why you should love it.
- 90/100
- Ellen Simpson
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- www.myspace.com/nazxul
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