Nathorg
Beyond the Gates of Nathorg

Nathorg is a land which has a main objective to fight against the filthy human world, does that sound interesting to you? Well, not much a surprise that the human world is filthy, you don’t need to be a rucola scientist to understand that. The fight against filthy humans is a certainty and one needed, I think for this band from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nation that this filth comes from religion and those things as they are said to be an anti-religious band according to some “reliable sources” that I have found, hate is another subject they apparently are writing lyrics about, sounds cheerful don’t you think? They have a blue cover with the typical black/death metal logo on it, and I saw a photo somewhere which was just as cheerful and joyous looking as the logo. I think that they do look a bit of a stereotype for the extreme genres.

So, these guys are from an interesting location and I cannot really imagine that their music is all to happily looked upon by everyone there as it is quite evil if you want to look at extreme metal in that way. Sort of a death/black metal thing where the production is a bit… shall we say sterile and rusty like a sterilised beaver that for some reason has swum into an empty oil drum partly filled with cold water floating in a cold river. The vocals are in that direction as well, sort of croaking growls like from inside an empty oil drum partly filled with cold water, kind of like the beaver would be needing a Fisherman’s Friend. It is fairly standard extreme metal stylistics we are given by these guys, the vocals sound kind of like they are screaming out their frustration of being anti-religious in a strongly muslim nation, the instruments are abused with the same frenetic feel. Still, if my words are not making sense to you in this descriptive and frankly brilliant paragraph then have a look at the names of the band members to the left of this text, that says it all about how this band sounds.

There are some samples below the text as well, just in case. But you’d do best in avoiding them because this isn’t good and that is mainly because of really poor vocals which ruins an otherwise quite decent extreme metal disc. This croaky, throat bleeding, silly vocal style makes the entire thing seem more silly than it should be because beneath this disturbance just like beneath the layers in a diamond mine, there are some great stuff and some finely sounding things. Unfortunately they are ruined by poor vocals that makes the album more or less unbearable despite the six tracks playing for less than 41 minutes in total. So I would recommend the one who is not looking for Iranian music to immediately look in another direction.

Maybe this works for those who like the ore traditional black/death metal stylings but I say maybe because of the fact that there are really few reviews out there on the net and the ones that are are in a silly or ununderstandable language, nothing in English and this despite the fact that there has been a month since this album was released, by an English label I might add. Therefore maybe, also maybe if you are curious about how extreme metal from Iran sounds. I would say that it sounds the same as most extreme metal, barren, like a coughing old man in a retirement home or something in that way so if you usually agree with my assessments about music then you’d better do something more productive (like sitting in an oil drum in a cold river) than listening to an album like this.

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