Band: Noctisdark
Title: The Roots Of Dreamers
Label: Own release
Distribution: Lugga Music
Release date: 31/07/2011
Review: CD

Noctisdark are a Catalonian (Spanish region) band, formed at the end of last century by two Ignis Aeterni members, Dani (v, g) and Alex (b). The duo wanted to continue the path they went with Ignis Aeterni initially, yet mixed with the astral elements of Samael’s Passage-era, and with Cradle Of Filth-inspired horror themes. Throughout the years, however, their style evolved intensively, adding elements from Doom and Doom-Death into their Dark Metal. In mean time, the duo recruited two new musicians, Hyban (g) and Albert (d), a nd with this line-up, Noctisdark recorded The Roots Of Dreamers at the Asstudio, which lasts for forty five minutes.

The Roots Of Dreamers goes mainly on in the vein of the former recordings, but unfortunately certainly not in a matured way – which one might expect / hope for after a decade of experience. The band’s Dark Metal is pretty varying in all aspects: vocals (clean, raw, screams, grunts, chants, …), tempo (even though mainly balancing between slow and, well, somewhere in between slow and not that very slow anymore, I guess), etc. Things that are constant throughout the album are the atmosphere and the specific musical performance; mind… The atmosphere is cold and dark, yet too mainstream, too goody-goody. It reminds me to, especially, some Italian or South-American acts from the nineties and early 2000’s (too many to mention, yet Crown Of Autumn might be a guideline???) that pretend to be ‘darkening’ yet without exhaling the suffocating (haha, ‘exhaling’ versus ‘suffocating’, am I not a verbal-wizard?) filth I (personally) prefer / need to hear behind the totality. It corresponds to the song structures, which are built upon good ideas, yet performed much too weak. This musical performance indeed is rather ‘soft’. There’s nothing wrong with being soft (at least when referring to melodic or melancholic states of mind) – heaviness in its most exaggerated form is as infantile as cowardish sweetness – but when it gets boring, I need to protect myself from spontaneous eruptions of spicy diarrhoea, I’m afraid. And in this case I do really need to collude my anal muscles to not explode into pyroclastic faeces-outbursts.

No, seriously, is it a joke? Is this meant to enjoy my ten-year old daughter (in case I did have one) to please her metallic-cultivating spirit? Oh, f*ck, ignore!

35/100

Ivan Tibos.