vote
8.5
- Band:
HexVessel - Duration: 00:57:59
- Available since: 13/06/2025
- Label:
-
Prophecy Productions
Streaming not yet available
Mat 'Kvohst' McNerney and the inspiration have been arming on for many years now, and his curriculum as a musician is sufficiently vast to make impression a little to everyone: Beastmilk/Grave Pleasures, Dodheimsgard, The Deathtrip, Void and a thousand other projects perhaps less exposed, but artistically remarkable.
Ours-of Albionic origins but for a long time active in the Scandinavian world-has given a new, umpteenth blow of the tail when he practically reinvented his Hexvessel, cloaking them with a completely new aura thanks to the introduction of post-black structures, atmospheric black and doom metal with the previous “Polar Veil”.
This new turning point has rejected the previous proposal which, in our opinion, was a little losing freshness and immediacy. What in “Polar Veil” has remained to bridge with the past is the enormous love for the nature of our mat and his narrative voice rigorously always in clean, therefore capable of creating particular songs and, in their own way, original: after less than two years, “nocurne” develops the same speech and – starting from the artwork – it is placed as a clear continuation both musical and conceptual.
If on the snowy village of the previous album a dark female figure hovered, this time the gray tones reveal, on the same homes, the presence of the skeletal features of the death itself. The musical path is analogous: after the melancholy notes of “Opening” plan, the long “Sapphire Zephyrs” resumes the speech exactly where it had been interrupted with the previous album. We are in front of eight minutes of a song that could be defined as the new trademark of ours: an electrical carpet of Black Metal invoice, acoustic guitars, the clean voice of Kvohst, interlude in Scream item and a total and emotional sound.
The next “Inward Landscapes” continues on the same style, accentuating the slowed component and Doom. We are again faced with a song of almost nine minutes that cannot fail to bring the Enslaved back to “Axioma Ethica Odini” to the mind. Also in this song the calm acoustic part and the decidedly prog-rock closure are noted, close if we want to certain opeths; “A Dark Graceful Wilderness” is more concise, structurally speaking, with once again a wonderful vocal line that combines well with black metal guitars and progressive keyboards.
All the rest of the tracklist alternates all the elements mentioned in an exemplary way and if “harmful” must certainly be listened to as an uninterrupted musical flow, we feel to mention at least the epic “Spirit Masked Wolf”, the acoustics “Concealed Descent” and the beautiful ambient parts of the final “Phoebus” as noteworthy moments.
“Nocturne” is, overall, made up of almost an hour of music and moves wonderfully well in a musical world that, for now, is frequented by a few. Compared to the previous “Polar Veil”, he manages to make the black metal structures more solid but to go to the seventy progressive path, both in electric and acoustic. Without so many laps of words: in these years you have been overflowing with “harmful” outings, in addition to being beautiful, it is an almost miraculous album in creating its own recognizable style since the very first listening.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
