NOCTURNUS — The Key (review)

NOCTURNUS — The Key album cover Album · 1990 · Technical Death Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Warthur
Acquiring a record deal with Earache thanks to their association with Morbid Angel, Nocturnus took death metal in a new direction with the addition of Louis Panzer on keyboards, proving to a sceptical extreme metal audience that keyboards could be as dark, sinister, and aggressive as any guitar riff. The narrative of the album might be kind of silly and juvenile (a Terminator-esque cyborg goes back in time - his target: Baby Jesus!), but it neatly demonstrated how death metal could tell stories and, indeed, tackle the concept album format just as well as any other rock music genre, and whilst the technicality of the album isn't on the level of contemporaries like Atheist and Cynic, it's still an entertaining slice of ugly Florida death metal which makes a perfect gateway drug to more esoteric technical death efforts.
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