Band:	Dauden I Mørke
Album:	Nephilim
Style:	Symphonic black metal
Release date:	January 01, 2012
A review by:	Troy Killjoy

01. Introduction
02. Spawn Of Subversive Desires
03. Til Ungdommen
04. Slaying Ravana
05. Nephilim
06. Remnants Of An Arcane War
07. Life Extermination Sequence
08. An Epitaph Lost And Forgotten
09. Fallen [Delerium cover]
10. Stem Of The Æther
11. Requiem

Nah, it's cool man. I didn't wanna sleep again anyway.

Seriously. You know the kid afraid of clowns? Like the innocent looking clowns at the circus, the ones you think... how the fuck can anyone honestly be afraid of that? And then that kid sees Sweet Tooth? And then he starts doing weird shit like installing a deadbolt on his bedroom door and barring his windows?

Well, Nephilim is my Sweet Tooth. And I spend a majority of my nights alone in a dark basement. As if it wasn't creepy enough down here.

Musically? Sure. It's some pretty raw black metal. With symphonic touches. It's that old-styled blasphemous shit that makes you run to the bathroom so you can smear on a few coats of corpsepaint before you head out to the tool shed to grab whatever your dad's got in there that could pass for a lethal weapon. More lethal than Mel Gibson giving a Bar Mitzvah speech.

The symphonic touches are rather subtle - mostly presented by some interesting piano/keyboard/synth/organ/whateverthefuck work - and fit well within the confines of the music, adding some weight to the sharp melodies and gnawing riffs. The presumably programmed drums find some interesting places to stay too, almost completely drowned in the mix but noticeable when you really want them to be.

That leaves the album's downfall - and, coincidentally, most horrifying attribute. The vocals. Oh dear god... the vocals. . . .

Basically the two guys responsible for shrieking into the mic sound like they haven't had any vocal training whatsoever. They did the corpsepaint/tool shed thing and thought, How can we fuck with some heads? And then they formed this band to do just that. The "spoken" word passages are downright sinister, like the demons out of a Hollywood exorcist film explaining their life story. (My name's Azazel and I've come to eat your children.)

And that all makes for some really evil-sounding shit. It isn't groundbreaking, it isn't atmospheric, it's not complex or avant-garde or anything else but a dirty, evil album by some guys who are probably going to burn my house down for saying they suck at singing.