Nihill - Verdonkermaan

Illustration man: Aubrey Beardsley

Nilhill's Verdonkeerman is available on their Hydra Head Records Bandcamp page. This is the last part of a trilogy, the first being Krach from 2007 and the second Grond from 2009. This is not your typical black metal stuff, thematically it deals with Gnosticism, philosophy and death. Musically it switches between extremely blackened doom/drone, densely layered and dissonant black metal, and harrowing ambient passages. Cheryl Primes's review from Cvlt Nation states that

Nihill celebrate the annihilation of life with sickening melody and chaos. Verdonkermaan ravages with grimy riffs and powerful walls of noise

The music is matched by screeches roars, moans and whispers from the vocalist. He also delivers some spoken word passages that are really out there, as Thom Jurek mentions in his AllMusic review of Grond:

Strange dynamics from utterly in-the-red distortion, crackle, and hum give way to repetitive bits of ambience and hypnotic single-string guitar patterns (not solos), and noise that feels almost like Merzbow ("Antimoon"). The strange wandering nightmare that is Grond is unlike anything else in metal. The spoken word bits ("Antimoon" and "Pulsus"), rather than sounding corny or affected, come across as extremely serious, disturbing, and poetic. This is the bleak void of black metal.

Here's a review of Krach from The Metal Archives, and a review of both albums from Global Domination.

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]