Nefarium
Praesidium
5.5
And here we have the first full-length effort from Italian black metal outfit Nefarium playing blasphemous black metal in the Swedish vein. Fast relentless blasts, slow and fast semi-melodic tremolo riffs, harsh black metal snarls. They’re all there…yet somehow I’m not satisfied. With so many bands producing stellar albums today it’s hard to muster any sort of fervor for a black metal band that comes off as nothing more than a throwback to the bands that influenced them.
The music literally has this hollow sound to it as if it was recorded in the depths of a cave. Not really my thing, but I admit it does suit the style of the band rather well. The band mixes strong influences from the likes of Carpathian Forest, Enthroned, old Dark Funeral, and Marduk into an unadventurous but potent mix of raw, unholy black metal. Yep, there’s not much else to say about it,granted the guys behind Nefarium are about as kvlt as one can get in this vein of black metal. They lay down the groundwork with strong a strong assuredness, but there's a strong, unshakable presence of uninspired monotony at work here. The songs “Cumshot on the Holy Virgin Cunt” and “The Hangman Walk" rain down with all of their unbridled infernal glory; “Roots of Guilt” is a harbinger of nefarious black metal purity, but I’m just not convinced about the greatness of Praesidium. There’s competent musicianship a plenty, but the album is a half hour blur of all the familiar black metal clichés.
The whole corpse paint ideology never appealed to me much. Why do I bring corpsepaint into this? Because the type of black metal bands who obsess over their image enough to play dress up for photo shoots tend to be the types to put out something this uninspired and by the books (I might not be metal enough, but I’ve never understood how you’re supposed to be serious and sadistic while looking like a macabre clown). Maybe I’m just a jaded prick, but bands like this are a dime a dozen. If a band fails to offer anything substantially different or expand upon the genre in any meaningful way, the result is the crippling sort of mediocrity that currently plagues Nefarium.
