NOKTURNAL MORTUM — Goat Horns (review)

NOKTURNAL MORTUM — Goat Horns album cover Album · 1997 · Symphonic Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
2.5/5 ·
Warthur
I'm honestly surprised that Nokturnal Mortum's Goat Horns gets the praise it does, because whilst at points its symphonic black metal approach can be pretty exciting, there's also some severe flaws with the album.

First off, you have nearly 9 minutes of the album's running time being eaten up by Black Moon Overture and Eternal Circle, the classical keyboard pieces which bookend it. Now, I'm not necessarily averse to black metal albums setting aside a large amount of their running time for electronic experiments - I love Burzum's Filosofem, for instance - but this cheesy nonsense just isn't of the level of quality necessary to win me over. Black Moon Overture is positively infuriating because it's presented as an intro piece but it's nearly 5 minutes long, which is about five times too much intro for me - I just want to yell at the album "Get to the point!"

As for the songs themselves, well, essentially Nokturnal Mortum take the early Dimmi Borgir compositional approach - complete with occasional use of acoustic instruments and plentiful keyboards. I guess the best thing I can say about this album is that it at least doesn't resort to the sort of overt Jew-baiting material the band would bring in from NeChrist onwards, and that there's points where the mashup of black metal and keyboards get genuinely interesting. However, it's too weighed down by lazy cliche and imitation of its betters to really convince me, and for most of the running time the keyboards are just in the way.

This is most evident on the mix of the title track, in which the keyboards - despite playing more or less constantly during the track - are more or less drowned out by the conventional metal instrumentation. And Goat Horns is the best song on the album (despite being overlong and labouring too many of its points) as a consequence of this; the fact is that the keyboard lines are the most cheesy and cliched aspects of the album, whilst the guitar work is the best. When you can take out a whole instrument from the mix and improve your album considerably, you know that something is deeply wrong.
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