Band:	Non Est Deus
Album:	Legacy
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	May 12, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Hiob
02. Written On Tombstones
03. Amos The Prophet
04. The Canon Of Nil
05. Redemption I
06. Redemption II
07. Thousand Years Of Sand
08. Babylon
09. The Last Act

"Dear God, I wrote you, but you still ain't calling."

Noise, the man behind Non Est Deus, has been a busy bee these past couple of years, with this being his fifth album since 2021, divided between his other solo projects in Kanonenfieber, and Leiþa, the latter of which also released a pretty cool album this year. All of these have a pretty signature Noise sound, but also a distinct sound not only among themselves, but also from album to album. In a way, Legacy doesn't necessarily sound closer to Non Est Deus' other works than to either Leiþa or Kanonenfieber. Curiously enough, there's another band that Legacy sounds suspiciously close to, and it's not one of Noise's projects. It's Mgła.

I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but you might've heard of the band Groza. If you're a fan of Mgła then you might already have mental lightbulb turning on because that's the name of one of their albums. Groza got attention because not only did they take their name from a Mgła album, but their sound was so close to Mgła's that people could pinpoint riffs that are literally identical, and at one point the band's two albums had nothing but multiple 0% reviews on their Metal-Archives page. Returning from this detour, Legacy is chockful of moments where I could be fooled are taken from Mgła songs. Yet, there's not the same kind of vitriol towards it, even if Noise is someone who has clearly been able to make his own unique sound. The question arises: why does Non Est Deus get a pass when Groza doesn't.

The first reason is conceptual. Even if the album may pick a lot of cues from someone else in the sound, the lyrical focus is still the Non Est Deus trademark. Even if divinity and its lack thereof has been a staple of black metal's thematic focus, to the point where basing your lyrics on it may feel a bit too obvious, Non Est Deus managed to squeeze this topic into something that's a more detailed, narrative, and exploratory take on the topic. On Legacy especially, Noise looks at stories in the Old Testament, but in which divinity was stripped out, and the resulting horrible recontextualization of that lack of divinity. Noise does mention the story of Lot offering his daughters to the angry Sodomite mob before them being rescued by angels (hint: the rescue doesn't happen in his version), so readers with more biblical knowledge than me, please feel free to identity the rest of the stories.

The second reason is musical. The sound is straddling a bit to close to comfort towards another band, to the point where everything from the vocals to the drumming, which were previously more recognizable as Noise, feel a lot closer to Mgła's M and Darkside respectively, from inflexions to the cymbal riding. But not identical. No riff that is literally identical. I could be wrong. But I also heard some moments like the more upbeat riffing in "Amos The Prophet" and "Babylon" that would never fit on a Mgła. There's a more melodic focus throughout that does make it at least a bit unique, but the fact that I literally had to fish for one or two moments that don't sound unmistakably influenced by this one other band isn't very good news.

What is good news, is that despite all this imitation talk, Noise is a very competent musician, and his imitation of that sound results in a bomb ass album. Just the fact that a one-man band can make both the riffing and the drumming sound this immensely superb is a colossal achievement.