AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: FRIGORIS — “NUR EIN MOMENT…”

 

On August 25, Hypnotic Dirge will release the new album by the German band Frigoris, whose name you may recall from the praise we heaped on an advance track from the album named “Trúwen”. Entitled Nur ein Moment… (Just one Moment…), it follows the band’s 2013 debut full-length Wind and is the first part of a two-album concept that follows “the tracks of a protagonist who faces the consequences of suicide in an interior journey.” Today we present a full stream of the album in advance of its release later this week.

Through the course of the album’s six long tracks Frigoris move from passages of soft, ethereal beauty to storms of surging blackened power, interweaving elements of black metal, post-metal and doom to create a journey through a changing emotional landscape of peaks and valleys.

 

 

Slow, shimmering, wistful guitar arpeggios and soulful violin solos create feelings of isolation and introspection that are grief-stricken yet bewitching. In the mind’s eye, the music calls up cascades of misting rain, glistening under dark skies, a manifestation of loss and remembrance.

Juxtaposed against these moments of beleaguered yet beguiling melody, accented by whispers and somber clean vocals, are gales of blasting/thundering percussion and raking chords, with the music’s intensity underscored by caustic shrieks that straddle the line between inconsolable anguish and red-hot fury. When Frigoris shift gears into these racing storm-fronts of sound, it’s a blood-rushing experience — with trilling tremolo melodies that prove to be memorable as well as gripping in the moment.

 

 

The album fires the imagination. The songs can be understood in different ways — as visions of changing physical landscapes that include both the hopelessness and abandonment of urban decay and the bleak majesty of ancient, rain-sodden forests, or as an exploration of interior landscapes of longing, depressive agony, and a measure of defiant hope.

But these are just my impressions. This kind of well-conceived and beautifully crafted atmospheric black metal is likely to resonant in a myriad of ways depending on what each listener brings to the experience. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

 

Nur ein Moment… will be released by Hypnotic Dirge Records on August 25 in a 4-panel digipack, with a 12 page booklet. To order, use these links:

http://www.hypnoticdirgerecords.com/
https://hypnoticdirgerecords.bandcamp.com/

SOCIAL MEDIA:
http://frigorisofficial.de/
https://www.facebook.com/Frigoris.Official/
https://www.facebook.com/hypnoticdirgerecords