Necrophobic
The Nocturnal Silence

THE REVIEW

A minute and forty-one seconds of tongue-twisting sung at the top of his lungs by Tom Araya, the craziest shard of that sonic devastation named “Reign in Blood”, the album that went beyond the known boundaries of the extreme at the time. What better name for a group born with the precise intent of creating a darker form of death metal?

The ultimate goal of Necrophobic at the beginning of their career was to throw death metal into an even blacker abyss than the one in which it was already born, to make the music as dark as pitch, cold and distant, yet still loaded with (obviously negative) emotions and morbid passion. So, enchanting and tempting melodies still make an appearance throughout the various songs of “The Nocturnal Silence”, debut album that came to light in the year of our Lord 1993, supported by the classic Swedish chainsaw guitars (Thomas Skogsberg docet) that relentlessly grate the air with always inspired and varied riffs occasionally aided by the touch of gloomy keyboards. In hindsight, it’s a very black way of interpreting death, so much so that as their history progresses, the band will veer toward a hybrid genre between the two, but the beauty of this record is that it is pure death metal in all respects despite conceptually wanting to be black metal, a genre that was emerging in Norway at the time but had not yet arrived in Sweden, just listen to Marduk's debut or the first demos of Dissection to realize that the reference was music in the style of Entombed and not that of Darkthrone. The power of death metal here is still at its peak, yet the blasphemous atmosphere that is created will make all those black metal enthusiasts with painted faces happy, whose wettest dream is to go buy a can of gasoline with Varg Vikernes.

An album that unites and satisfies two worlds, which though close, are distant, even if it may not seem so.