Year: 2024
Label: Zoharum
“Sludge/doom metal with drone and dark ambient elements.” What kind of music does that make you think of? Me, I think of some kind of minimalistic, raw, borderline funeral doom experimentalism. Something that reeks of nightmares, terrors and anxiety.
Well, Polish Noche Oscura don’t offer anything like that on this, their second album. If anything, their music veers into some kind of post-metal territory, decidedly away from any funeral epithets.
The band take their name from a poem by 16th century mystic St. John Of The Cross, Dark Night of the Soul. This night is one where darkness is balanced by the prospect of light, of a ray illumining the benighted depths of the tormented soul. In many ways, it is exactly this interplay between darkness and light which is at the core of the Polish project’s entirely instrumental album.
Though the genre description quoted above is in itself quite accurate, overall Noche Oscura’s sound isn’t heavy in a metallic sense. True, there are distorted guitars churning out slow, heavy handed dirges, but the result isn’t heavy in a conventional way. I’d liken it more to the massive darkness of a truly dark night, almost epic in its density. And dense is the keyword to describe the guitar tone: dense, downtuned, but still soft in a way.
Noche Oscura balances these moments with passages of tender, almost fragile beauty; lingering melodies speak of serene twilight moments, radiating a soft light as of a full moon filtered through green leaves. Especially the beginning of The Two Gardens, second of the three long tracks the album consists of, which prominently features the Japanese shakuhachi flute, is replete with an almost aching beauty – a divinity just out of touch.
Even though Gardens predominantly takes a conventionally musical form, being performed with a traditional metal setup of electric guitar, electric bass and drums (padded out with other instruments here and there), I would first and foremostly recommend this to fans of more ambient music. The soft soundscapes of Gardens are best suited as background music, featuring precious few elements for the listener to actively latch on to. But don’t take this as a negative remark: in that role, Gardens is a beautifully atmospheric, nocturnally beautiful album of light and shadow, hope and despair, love and abandonment.
Gardens is not a particularly hard album to get into. Quite the contrary, in fact: musically, there’s very little here that’s hard to swallow even for a non-metal fan. The album isn’t abrasive or aggressive; again, it’s exactly the opposite, soft and calm. There is a darkness here, but it is not a consuming darkness. Noche Oscura’s darkness harbours despair, but above all its darkness cradles a soft light of hope.
Only Death Is Real 