Helstar
Nosferatu

THE REVIEW

The black curtain rose for the first time back in 1897.
At the hands of an Irish mathematician named Abraham Stoker, from the stage made of dense pages, letters, and diaries, poured forth a fluid that still survives today. Terrible, yet captivating. Eternal and seductive as only horror can be.
Nosferatu.
The prince of the night.

“From the seed of Belial came the vampire Nosferatu which liveth and feedeth on the blood of mankind and abiveth, unredeemed, in horrible darkness, on the cursed earth from the graveyards of the Black Death”

The myth had taken root. Murnau / Schreck would give it a face. Herzog / Kinski would give it life. It's 1989 when the black curtain is raised again, this time for a thrash album.
And once again, it's a masterpiece.

Dawn as a sentence, the skin caressing the velvet and the razor that slashes it, the nightmare that survives wakefulness, everything flows into a static vortex of rhythms never so tight, into a sonic claw that leaves blood-soaked scores on the music sheet, perfect in their diabolic beauty.
The notes seem to tangle, chase each other, composing black lace on a canvas where the warp is technique and the weft is emotions: the perfect union of performance skill, virtuosity, display of technical abilities and feeling, atmosphere, color.
The band's sound is completely immersed in the vampiric drama.
It emerges as a sort of “power thrash opera”, where Helstar manages to capture both natures of the myth: the romantic and suffering one, desperately yearning for its own liberation and living with anguish in its desolate eternity, and the dark, evil one, ruthlessly devoted to others' suffering.
The entire album is permeated by an incredible “sense of balance”, by the peaceful coexistence to which violence and poetry are coerced.
An album with a decidedly high technical rate, but never overindulging in self-satisfaction.
Powerful and aggressive, yet never banal. Epic with a strong theatrical component, without ever being cloying.
The technique, in particular, is totally subservient to the song form: it's not a display of mastery, a presumptuous self-admiration, but refinement of solutions, unpredictability, and good taste of arrangements.
The delightful sophistication of some harmonic passages, some snare touches, the frequent neoclassical digressions, are never an end unto themselves, but become indispensable contrasts to the more direct and aggressive parts. The (numerous) acoustic digressions do not weaken the aggressiveness of the sound but, on the contrary, dialectically enhance the more typically thrashy guitar outbursts (for example, “The Curse Has Passed Away”).
There is a strong sensation of facing a band fully aware of its means, willing to dare, but with nothing more to prove.
Above all, a splendid James Rivera, perhaps never so ready to change register, never so much a prey and master of the facets of his voice. Having left behind the uncertainties and flaws of the earliest records, he is now able to masterfully balance lyricism and power, theatricality of singing and immediacy of vocal lines.

Even the second part of the album, although not inspired by the deeds of the prince of darkness, remains at very high technical-compositional levels.
Sure, the feeling is of returning to the “usual” “proto prog thrash” album (I just made this up on the spot…), lacking the inspiration and charm that pervade the concept.
Nevertheless, the songwriting remains excellent, and even the song I find the weakest of the package – the concluding and (I believe in the band's intentions) epic “Aieliaria and Everonn” – boasts exemplary care and sophistication of solutions.
A slight drop in tension, in short, but nothing that prejudices or compromises the rest.

Listened to today, “Nosferatu” suffers not at all from the passage of time.
This, while surely an advantage on one hand, perhaps explains the cold reception it received from the audience of the time: a classic album “too ahead of its time”, in short, for an audience and a genre that – at least until the early '90s – have always had difficulty digesting novelties and experimentation.
With the disheartening commercial failure came the first internal dissensions in the band and the subsequent departure of some of the most valuable pieces of the mosaic (the genius guitarist André Corbin, incidentally the sole author of the splendid instrumental “Perseverance and Desperation”, and the drummer Frank Ferreira).
The much later and unlistenable “Multiples of Black” from 1994 remains, to date, an unsurpassed example of a lack of ideas and inspiration aridity, but also (and above all), a sad warning for all who intend to raise the black curtain again.

“Those who say 'Death is cruel' are only the unaware...but Death is just a clean cut...it is far more cruel not to be able to die...”