Band:	Nachtvorst
Album:	Silence
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	May 2012

01. The Serpent's Tongue
02. After...
03. Nightwinds
04. Gentle Notice Of A Final Breath
05. ...Before
06. A Way Of Silence

What the hell is that thing, anyways? Some kind of crustacean and a sword or something? Is that what silence is supposed to look like? Have I been drawing it incorrectly in pictionary all these years? In a sense, that album artwork does reflect Nachtvorst's music pretty well. It's simple, dark, menacing and certain understated sense of ambiguity.

Ambiguity you say, eh? Well shit, Nachtvorst almost sounds like a different band with each song...Or segment, as some of these "songs" tend to feel like 3 songs tied together over a 9 minute period. One minute, you're dealing with a brooding, minimalistic shoegaze album, the next, it's a groovin' sludge-doom sound, followed by some atmospheric post-rock. All these various sounds are tied together with crusty black metal guitar tones and some distant growls & wailing shrieks.

Unfortunately, eclectic does not arbitrarily equate to genius, and Silence is a grand example of this. Yes, they did manage to tie in a decent spectrum of sounds here, but frequently these various parts are executed very generically, or are just excruciatingly boring. Silence is the sound of a band spreading themselves too thin. They display fantastic examples of each style of music they play, so there really isn't any aspect that really deserves to be cut out entirely, but there is a certain amount of filler or overindulgence into particular extended atmospheric passages.

Silence is a watermelon type of album; consume the juicy dripping body of it, spit out the slimy seeds of pretentiousness, toss the rind of filler and you've got yourself a highly enjoyable experience.