Nordland

Nordland is a quite new band from United Kingdom that it was created by Vorh, its only member, in 2011 and released the first demo in the same year. The first thing that grubs the attention, when you get the cd, is the very beautiful, minimalist layout with photographs of natural landscapes, the tracks written in a style which reminds of runic alphabet and the band’s logo. That frozen, epic feeling which was created by the layout, I found it both in their music. In Nordland we will find six compositions (the final track is an ambient outro) of frozen, harsh, with epic elements Black Metal heavily influenced by the Scandinavian sound and more specifically they remind me of Enslaved quite a lot, of Immortal quite less and in the more epic slow parts of Bathory.

In the riffs, the epic element of the band is intense both in the slower parts both in the faster which combine hatred with epic feeling. Although the tracks are quite big in duration, the riffs can keep the listener. All instruments are played very well. The drums sound to me natural, but if they are drum machine, this is the best sound and programming I have ever listened to by a drum machine. The vocals are harsh, filtered and modified in studio and they reminded me of Satyricon. Although most of the times I get annoyed by that kind of vocals, in this album they were quite good, but not anything different. The production is clean, emphasizing in the bass, gives a very full and massive sound. The mix is amazing as every instrument is in the proper volume so as the listener can listen to each instrument clearly and at the same time that massive sound isn’t lost. The lyrics are written in English and they are a journey in a frozen, dark, pagan and full of hate land.

The six tracks that Nordland contains, if I exclude the title track which made me bored, are very interesting and show that they have been worked a lot before they were released. After this demo I believe that in the future United Kingdom may have Black Metal scene. Also I have to mention that this release is self – funded so you have to support a release so good and buy it…