Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Moonspell
Label: Napalm Records
Release: 2012
Running time: 40:34 (Alpha Noir) / 38:10 (Omega White)
Rating: 5/5
Moonspell are Portuguese symphonic black metallers who are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Through their studio output, the band has always explored and pushed its own artistic and creative limits. With Moonspell, it’s hard to say they stick strictly to metal. At the core, yes! Moonspell come out of black metal, and the band’s new work holds to it firmly and unmistakably, but their vocabulary also holds a whole heap of other genre shades, like dark, gothic, world music,… From early naivety to growing into true masters of their metal craft.
The 2008 album »Night Eternal« gave Moonspell one of the most mature records of their career – you could say the toughest and darkest, and at the same time, in terms of songcrafting, one of their most polished albums. »Art symphonic black metal a la Moonspell« – an instantly recognizable stance. If that album delivered the extreme yet melodically catchy aggression of Moonspell-style black metal for most of its running time, not hiding the big leaps forward in arrangements, the loosening-up of the basic black metal form, and »detours« like Scoripon Flower and Dreamless into dreamy, ambient yet infectious waters of melodies soaked in »gothic« flavor, this time the band decided on a very interesting move.
Clearly the guys have lightning flashing in their heads and are bursting with ideas. »Night Eternal« showed that the lineup had found a new creative drive, but nobody saw it coming that with their next studio move they’d drop two albums at once. What the previous album combined on a single disc, Moonspell have now split across two. Two albums. The first is »Alpha Noir«, the second »Omega White«. And you only get the latter in the limited double-CD edition. So picking that one up is a must. One album doesn’t work without the other. Vibe-wise they’re as tightly bound as the devilish/angelic twins on the cover of »Bonded In Blood«, the cult thrash metal classic by Exodus.
The first is an album totally stripped of the influences that Moonspell have, with more or less success, woven into their metal throughout their career. »Alpha Noir« is boundlessly ravenous, cataclysmically vampiric in production, a thundering symphonic black metal testament, with no room for prefixes, impulses and genre detours like ambient, gothic, dark, rock, or even programmed sampling and so on. Still, for all its hugely satisfying and very welcome brutality, »Alpha Noir« doesn’t hide its »Portuguese« ethnic sentiment, as in the melodic middle bridge of Grandstand, or in the partial use of Portuguese, masterfully woven into the fantastic and surely strongest moment of »Alpha Noir«, called Em Nome Do Medo.
»Alpha Noir« carries on from the point of development in Moonspell’s black metal craft set by the previous album. In four years, the band managed to put together songs with exceptionally polished arrangements. Songs that, each on its own and as finished parts of a bigger whole (the album), have an outstanding expressive character, let’s just call it art charisma. Ribeiro’s vocals are vampirically produced! When the vocals hit in the opener Axis Mundi, it feels like a whole choir of little devils climbed out of hell into heaven, grinding the world to ash and dust. Merciless, with nothing but rage and fury everywhere. The album starts to open up through a firmly dictated rhythm of bombastically produced drums, with deliberately dissonant guitar screeching gradually joining in from all sides, until they suddenly merge into full thematic focus and »Alpha Noir« hits in full swing from there on. The bombast created this way doesn’t let up in the air until the album’s very last moment. The closer Sine Missione is an instrumental symphonic black metal testament that wraps up »Alpha Noir«.
Moonspell pulled off a set of striking guitar phrases that reach peak expressiveness. Over them often lies hellishly fast single-line picking of guitar ornaments, and in line with established black metal methods, the band gets its dynamics by dosing individual passages with a bigger or smaller measure of symphonic sound (keyboards playing the role of orchestral arrangements). All this doesn’t just build bombast; with riff aggression and Fernando’s extreme growling, it further lays bare all the furious vampirism of this album. The second verse of the title track Alpha Noir hints, in Ribeiro’s vocals, at what awaits us on »Omega White« in terms of expressiveness and atmosphere on the additional (sister) album, as he sings the lines gothic-style (clean, pitched lower, in falsetto). All the vocal tracks on »Alpha Noir« practically compete with each other over which will steal the spotlight, with such polished and perfected charisma in songwriting and sound. Favorites are your pick. This is an album that doesn’t let the listener breathe!
The production squeezes out the maximum. The contrast between the building blocks of the basic sonic culture, along with the additions already mentioned (orchestral arrangements, echo-heavy voluminous effect that deepens Fernando’s venomous growling,…), is optimal. And Moonspell-style black metal spits out ammo from magazines that never run empty.
The second album, »Omega White«, is the complete opposite, and as such clearly shows that Moonspell are already so artistically mature, seasoned and experienced as musicians, and also so open-minded, that nobody would be surprised if they dropped metal altogether down the road and switched to the most bizarre forms of making music tied to genres that have nothing to do with metal. Well, for »Omega White« it has to be said that the truth lies somewhere in between, but it’s precisely its experimental side that shows there’s far more than (just) metal hiding in the talents of the band’s members.
Even though it’s a different story from »Alpha Noir«, a fair share of metal hardness sticks to it, which, thanks to the different arrangement setting, also picks up a power metal component, while the whole thing is steeped first and foremost in gothic metal impulses, and on the surface there’s even a deliberate play with programmed sampling and industrial leanings. Ribeiro’s vocals turn gothic, low-pitched, almost whispery, and the whole thing at times hits very close to the tricks of the late Type O Negative (the song New Tears Eve is dedicated to their departed singer Peter Steele). In Incantatrix the verse is led by a classical piano, and the band builds a superb contrast, graduating from the tantalizingly dark yet bombastic atmosphere of the verse into a melodically catchy chorus. A song born for heavy rotation on the charts! »Omega White« is thus a continuation of the story of the songs Scorpion Flower and Dreamless from the album »Night Eternal«.
»Alpha Noir« and »Omega White« in one piece is a new milestone in Moonspell’s evolution, one the band will have to know how to surpass as it matures in the future. It is the noisiest, darkest and most ruinous album in the band’s story (Alpha Noir), while for Omega White we can even say it’s a one-of-a-kind bonus sister album, the likes of which the band has never recorded. In these documents of painfully sweet, boundless passions of Sodom-and-Gomorrah hedonism, which the new Moonspell release brings, you’ll be bleeding from the ears for a very long time (»Alpha Noir«), while at the same time, in the realm of ice cubes, you cool your ears with the masterfully experimental album »Omega White«, wrapped in a perfect play of shadows.
Why does an edition of »Alpha Noir« exist without the sister »Omega White«? The reason probably lies in the fact that such a double-album package would bother especially the part of the Moonspell fan base that swears by the band’s black metal roots and could be put off by »excessive« experimenting with sound. But those of you who want to get to the bottom of it, make sure to get the limited-quantity double version of »Alpha Noir/Omega White«!
Given all this, the extraordinary level of creative insight shown, and hearts beating on the same wavelength in a team sharply focused on reaching and realizing the same goal, the future for Moonspell is without a doubt hugely promising in the artistic sense, since the band keeps its trait of challenging itself, which opens the developmental doors to many genre directions. It’ll be really interesting to watch what kind of salty black metal these excellent Portuguese music heavyweights of the »ugly trade« will serve up next.
»Alpha Noir/Omega White« is an exceptionally refined achievement created under the baton of filigree perfectionism. If you want to be thoroughly irradiated and pummeled in one go (»Alpha Noir«) and then left icily post-orgasmically stunned (»Omega White«), you have to enjoy the double edition (both albums back to back). Moonspell’s new work is without a doubt one of the best studio efforts released this year in the field of metal releases, and that goes for the world at large.
Lineup
Fernando Ribeiro – vocals
Ricardo Amorim – guitar
Pedro Paixão – keyboards, guitar
Aires Pereira – bass guitar
Miguel Gaspar – drums
Production
Tue Madsen
Track list
ALPHA NOIR:
1. Axis Mundi
2. Lickanthrope
3. Versus
4. Alpha Noir
5. Em Nome Do Medo
6. Opera Carne
7. Love is Blasphemy
8. Grand Stand
9. Sine Missione
OMEGA WHITE:
1. Whiteomega
2. White Skies
3. Fireseason
4. New Tears Eve
5. Herodisiac
6. Incantatrix
7. Sacrificial
8. A Greater Darkness
