AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NEBELKRÄHE — “NIELANDSMANN”

On October 27th Crawling Chaos Records will release a new album named ephemer by the Munich-based black metal band Nebelkrähe — their first full-length in a decade. It’s a most unusual album, extraordinarily varied in its sounds and moods, and in its vocals, instrumentation, and melodies, the kind of album in which conventions of black metal are disregarded as often as they are honored.

The band point toward those variations mentioned above in their epigram for the album: “Memories – rainbow bubbles for adults.” (A. Engel) They explain its significance this way:

What sounds kitschy at first can also be read soberly and unromantically: Like soap bubbles that burst to the horror of the naïve child if he or she gets too close to them, even the most dazzling memories are fleeting and ephemeral – or, in German, ephemer.

They also share that the German-language lyrics “tell of blurred boundaries, youth gone by, and shattered dreams of life – as a tribute to the allure and horrors of transience.”

Photo Credit: Afra Gethöfer Grütz

And further:

This ambivalence also characterizes the visual concept of the album: child and man on the cover seem united in their pure joy – but they are separated by the knowledge of transience. As a black-and-white photo, this encounter full of colorful lightness is inverted into a gloomy vanitas still life – just as, conversely, the morbid corpsepaint in the band photos is counteracted by vibrant colors.

The music itself is marked by vibrant colors, as well as shades of black, which is vividly illustrated in the song that’s the subject of the video we’re premiering today. The song is also a very serious and timely one, with a tragic theme of human deformity that seems doomed to be repeated over and over again.

The song is “Nielandsmann“, presented today through a video that captures incidents from a previous World War. Bandmember Morg has given us these comments about it, which are well worth reading before you watch and listen:

The lyrics for “Nielandsmann” were written in 2015 – borders and the immense importance of the coincidence on which side of a border one was born were brought home to all of us at that time in the context of the refugee crisis. The fact that the lyrics are more topical than ever today due to an imperialist warmonger in a completely different context was of course not foreseeable – but shows once again that mankind does not learn.

The song was never meant to be “war black metal”, on the contrary. I was fascinated by the concept of the “border” – and how quickly this so clearly defined, hard concept loses any meaning as soon as there is no one left to draw such a border. How purely hypothetical this whole construct is, on which patriotism is based – that is the core message of “Nielandsmann“.

The frame story of the text is primarily a deep bow to Erich Maria Remarque, who has repeatedly and impressively depicted precisely this senselessness of wars and the all-determining relevance of what is written on your passport in his works. When I then met Noise from KANONENFIEBER in 2022 shortly before the recordings were completed as a likewise great Remarque admirer, it was naturally obvious to invite him as a guest singer for this song.

As we’ve already hinted, the music within “Nielandsmann” is not conventional black metal. Perhaps most prominently, it includes brass instrumentation carrying a somber melody in a way that seems to connect to an older time, closer to the harrowing events depicted in the video, as well as guitar passages that ring with crystalline clarity.

Blast beats are also largely missing in action, though the drums do eventually mimic machine-gun fire. And at times the riffing seems to swing and whirl around a vivid bass-thrust (the bass is a vivid and welcome presence throughout).

Even the vocals are in some respects atypical of the norm, but in all their harsh variations they’re so impassioned and intense that hearing them puts the hairs up on the back of a listener’s neck. As much as anything in the song, they channel the fear, fury, frenzy, and wrenching pain of combatants on a ruthless battlefield.

The riffing, still near-crystalline in its sound, itself also boils in frenzies of intensity and pulses like blood from an open wound, and the brass melody itself rises, channeling a feeling of fervor and urgent striving.

In a nutshell it’s a fascinating piece of music, and utterly gripping from beginning to end. As you’ll see, the video is also thoroughly gripping.

With respect to the video, as you’ve seen it includes both scenes specifically filmed for the music video, but also “retrospective” excerpts of combat from the short film 1916 made by PARALIGHTWORX. Here again are Morg‘s comments:

To produce scenes with a single protagonist was complex, but was within the scope of what we could do – but to recreate war in detail is something else again. The fact that PARALIGHTWORX, as experts in this field, provided us with their movie made our clip in this form possible in the first place. A big thank you to this crew and maximum respect for the meticulousness and professionalism with which these guys produce their films. If you are interested in war re-enactment, you should definitely check out their YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@ParaLightWorX!”

We also want to share with you a previously released video for “Kranichträume“, the first single off ephemera. This one was shot in the pandemic summer of 2020 on the Faroe Islands, and the music features performances by Markus “Schwadorf” Stock (Empyrium) on dulcimer and Sinan Yarar (Velvet Smoke) on harp. Once more we have Morg‘s comments to introduce it:

“Kranichträume” was one of the first tracks created for ephemer. However, making this intricate song sound the way it has ‘sounded’ in our heads all these years was one of the biggest challenges in album production. The fact that Markus Stock contributed this beautiful hammered dulcimer accompaniment was crucial – the rest we owe to Victor Bullock‘s sure instinct in the mix. Overall, the song is rather on the mellow end of our scale – together with the next, much heavier single, it pretty well stakes out the stylistic framework in which we move on ephemer.”

Of course, that much heavier single is the one we’ve presented today. Here’s the video for “Kranichträume“:

Crawling Chaos will release ephemera on digipack CD and vinyl formats, as well as digitally, and pre-orders are being launched today via Bandcamp and the label’s webshop:

PRE-ORDER:
https://nebelkraehe.bandcamp.com/album/ephemer
https://thecrawlingchaos-records.de/NEBELKRAeHE

FOLLOW NEBELKRÄHE:
https://www.facebook.com/NebelkraeheOfficial