Septrion – Nocturnal Grimness
Damn if this isn’t the most generic title for a black metal release ever! Fortunately the music isn’t nearly as boring. Septrion’s a little-known Mexican black metal outfit that actually manages to stand out from the crowd due to pure strength in songwriting rather than gimmicks. They play a very Norwegian style of modern black metal, with an emphasis on blast beats and tremolo riffs just as much as clean guitar passages and constantly twisting and turning songwriting. It’s very good.
Septrion doesn’t do anything openly new. They simply craft bigger, better riffs than other bands, have cleaner, more incisive production than others, and have a sense of brutality created by musicians who give a shit about what they’re doing. There’s carefully constructed tempo changes that pass from raging blasting to epic Graveland-inspired sections without missing a beat, as well as a bit of late-Immortal style epic/melodic riffing. It’s fairly creatively arranged, with some openly neoclassical guitar pits peppering the music throughout. The best comparison I could draw is to newer Keep Of Kalessin in overall style. I like how, I don’t know, ‘coherent’ the riffing is; the band has a very clear vision of the sound they’re going for and they make it work. The vast majority of the music is conventional modern black metal, but Septrion just do it BETTER than others. Plus there’s a neat Sarcófago cover which makes it that much better!
This isn’t a MANDATORY release to get, but if you’re a fan of modern black metal you’d be better off with it in your collection. ‘Nocturnal Grimness’ is way ahead of most of the major bands out there today, and has production values on par with most of the guys on Candlelight. I really recommend this; besides, there’s only 500 copies, and you want to be cult, don’t you?
