vote
5.5
- Band:
NORNA - Duration: 00:40:49
- Available from: 08/30/2024
- Label:
-
Pelagic Records
Streaming not yet available
In 2020, while we were comfortably anguished on the sofa, Norna was born from an idea by the Swedish musician Tomas Liljedahl (a very respectable curriculum as a vocalist for Breach, The Old Wind and Terra Tenebrosa) and the Swiss Christophe Macquat and Marc Theurillat (members of Ølten, authors of an interesting instrumental stoner with tribal overtones). From their first cries (not exactly tender), the band has fed on the same sense of uncertainty and isolation that we had all felt locked in our homes, with the plague outside; yet, the icy post-metal gusts and the extremist violence of the debut (“Star Is Way Way Is Eye”, 2022), had not aroused particular interest. The problems of the proposal had not gone unnoticed even in these pages, where a lack of originality was underlined and, consequently, a limited ability to leave a mark within a scene already full of valid offerings. No big deal, smudges and uncertainties are typical of the debuts, so in the following two years the band dedicated itself to refining its live experience, obtaining flattering satisfactions, including a stage presence at Roadburn.
English: Two years after their debut, Norma are back on the market with a self-titled album, this time produced by their friend Magnus Lindberg. Cult of Luna remain, as in the past, one of the main references, but in their new work the trio opts for a further extremization of their style, preferring a minimalist sound, capable of recalling the pneumatic vacuum of deep space rather than the winter twilight of Scandinavian forests. This impression is confirmed by the regular flashes that set fire to the initial “Samsara”, with its martial rhythm and the abrupt interruptions in the middle of the piece as per post-metal tradition, or in the reiterated chords of a “For Fear Of Coming”, which brings to mind the catastrophic sound visions of Neurosis’s “Enemy Of The Sun”. When you decide to embrace such a monochrome sound, however, you should also have a set of ideas available to shade the songs here and there, in short, to make them at least distinguishable from each other. Instead, between the exhausted dragging of the sludge number “Shine By It's Own Light” and the elementary riff placed there to almost entirely support a “Shadow Works” that in theory wants to hark back to the early Amenra, a sense of boredom creeps into the listener, only partly attenuated by the respect for the musicians' past, a tiredness that is only slightly calmed in the five minutes of the more refined “Ghost”, not by chance chosen as a single, where Liljedahl manages for once to evoke the ancestral terror that dwelt in the sound of his Terra Tenebrosa, fishing out a chilling industrial coda of filtered voices and obsessive rhythms intertwined with each other.
A jolt that is still little, for an album that, like its predecessor, must find space among the numerous (and often more original) monthly releases and compete with the memory of other excellent works attributable to these musicians, such as “Feast On Your Gone” by The Old Wind and, indeed, “The Purging” by Terra Tenebrosa. Ultimately, another missed opportunity.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM