Mz.412 — Nordik Battle Signs

“Nordik Battle Signs” is the third in the series of reissue of  classic MZ.412 albums by Cold Spring Records. The album original appeared back in 1999, and it offers up a mixture of  satanic sample heavy bombastic &  blacked industrial work-outs, dark ambient dwells, dark chant lined electro broods, and genreal dark, noisy & brooding sound-scraping.

Though this album does have it’s moments of great-ness, for me this is the most mixed & least consistent of the three MZ.412 reissued thus far. So lets get the negative stuff over with first, and then move onto the more positive stuff. First up it feels like the first five or six tracks see the projects just going through the motions mixing together distorted industrial & militant drum tracks with sinister synth lines, rather uninspired samples, and other rather predictable textures- these tracks lack both memorable elements, atmosphere and variation with little or no change of pace between each. Secondly the album often feels bitty & broken-up, the other Mz.412 albums seemed to follow an album like arch with all the album tracks working well to create a lengthy & troubling ritual like feel- “Nordik Battle Signs” often feels like a collection of unreleased tracks.

So that’s the negative stuff out of the way lets move onto the more positive & rewarding elements of the album which for me come in the second half of the record when there seems more thought put into track construction, memorable elements, atmosphere and variation in pace. Really from track seven “Satan Jugend II: Global Konquering” untill the end of the album on track twelve is all is pretty good, and some of the highlights are: “NBS Act I: Begravning” which finds a sinister male Germanic voice repeating a simple phase over and over again over a mixture of: brooding dark feedback drifts, stripped & brooding industrial machine beats,  and swirling/ darkly atmospheric synth drifts. “In Hoc Signo Vinces” which brews up a great urgent to brooding mixture of: wavering & electro melted chanting, stop/start huge sounding chop ‘n’ churning industrial beat texturing/pounding, with  seared & prime evil buzzing noise feedback drifts. Really the latter half of the album does offer some of the projects best stand alone tracks, it’s just a pity they don’t work as a whole & you have the first 5 or 6  'MZ.412 by numbers' tracks in front of them.

So on the whole this is a very mixed, and mostly unfocused album with moments of greatness appearing later on. Not really one for those just getting into this project, but if you have the other two reissues in this series then this is certainly worth pick-up, just don’t expect an album that’s as consistent or rounded as the first two MZ.412 albums.