Nocturnus - The Key

Well, no job at the fast food joint to finance my concert going habits, and my English class is heaping tons of work on me so no review Thursday or yesterday as I tended to more important shit. Oh and I got hit with four inches of snow. Have no fear though! I'll give ye a double dose today to make up for it.

And we'll start out with one of the most innovative early death metal albums ever released. Remember, this album was released in 1990. At the time Atheist wer just starting to go down their ultra jazzy progressive route and Death had just put out Spiritual Healing, arguably the first technical death metal album ever. So when Nocturnus released The Key complete with keyboards and technical out of this world guitars, it blew some minds away. And hell, it still does to this day.

The album art is kickass to start with, almost all early death metal albums had great artwork. Having never listened to Nocturnus before, I thought the music would not live up to the epicness of the cover, but I was dead fucking wrong. The art and the music complement each other perfectly, and you can't help but get this spacey 70's vibe when you listen to the tracks roll on and stare at the front cover.

The production is primitive sounding, but it doesn't take away from the music, quite the contrary. They're so many layers and textures going on all at once it's hard to grasp completely what's going on, so major points for replay value there. they keyboards play a major roll here, giving fantastic intro and outros as well as performing underlying layers that would normally fall under bass duties. Speaking of which, the bass is all but missing here. In parts where I thought I did here it the keyboards were to credit, playing lower synths. The drums do their job and do it well. Thought they seem to be mixed back, they still carry a sharp sound to them when struck. The vocals are reminiscent of David Vincent from early, thrashy, Morbid Angel. And then we get to the guitars which are front and center, as should be expected of death metal. Mike Davis and Sean McNenney both provide pounding pulsing technical riffs on top of it all. Often, there are multiple solos per song, and some of the riffs are so complicated they could be solos for lesser bands.

There hasn't been another pressing of this album for quite some time, so if you find a good copy of this somewhere buy it. Disappointment is no where to be found in this record.