Häxenzijrkell — Die Nachtseite
The three raw tracks featured drag themselves though blacked, at points doom tipped metttlics for around thirty six minutes. The whole album penetrates eerie pleasantly through ones ear canals deep into the convolutions of the brain, sending the listener into a delusional journey of a transcendental blackness.
Die Nachtseite begins with dark sounds and a female narrator's voice drawing us into the deep raptured cosmos of the first piece "Auf Der Schwelle”. As soon as the distorted guitars come in , and the mid-tempo drums kick off a reverb-wrapped procession of the dead, there's no return!. Both the slow and fast parts are well balanced to the keyboard passages and the punky, snotty mid-90’s Black Metal style. After just over ten minutes, “Auf Der Schwelle” just ends as nebulously as it began.
With the second track " Unter Sieben Sternen" the night sky opens before my inner eye... Floating, crystal clear synths create a transcendental atmosphere until another deep black painted doom thunderstorm finally breaks. The minimal use of the synthesizer, remains as a supporting element, but really carries the tracks mood. “Das Licht ist offenbarte Finsternis” is proclaimed in a spoken word passage, letting the piece rise up again before it ends after ten minutes in a whirlwind of diffuse ambient sounds.
With the third track we arrived “Im Labyrinth der Dunkelheit”, and the two-headed satan invites us to a final, slowly rearing dance in the darkness!. Painful screams accompany us directly into a underworld of spherical, ghostly sounds of atmospheric nature and muddy, hard-pressing guitars mixed up with clearly understandable, yet ultra-heavy drums. After almost firteen minutes the piece, and with it the album, slowly but surely finds its grandiose finale. With high speed, the drumsticks sweep over the snare one last time, before the circle closes and the torch is extinguished. Moody drone sounds guide us through the darkness after the last guitar note fades out and close the gate behind us ...
With Häxenzijkell’s Die Nachtseite, Amor Fati Productions brings us another most worthy German BM album, but caution is also advised too. At points the album may be a bit too monotonous for some, and the lyrics/meaning maybe be hard to catch, especially for none German speakers. As an introduction to the blacked ritualistic metal of Häxenzijrkell, I’d recommend the slightly less transcendental EP Von Glut Und Wirbelrauch, but if you dig that, then just continue onto this.