REVIEWED: Nadir's 'Honour The Cavalry'
With a sound as dark and densely luxuriant as the dusky wealth of sweeping brushstrokes seen here adorning its cover in murkily atmospheric abundance, it’s easy to get lost in this instantly absorbing doom fest of a four-tracker. Through whirling strains of scalpel-sharp tremolo and ceaselessly pulverising bass groove, the Hungarian doomsters effortlessly seize control of the senses with all the tautly executed precision you’d expect of their 25 year-long tenure.
But for all the evidently seasoned experience on show here, the blistering energy and deathly presence underpinning this nightmarish EP is as satisfyingly raw and visceral as a freshly opened wound. With its generous and densely layered application of churning bass and belching, coldly inhuman screams worthy of a Nordic winter, ‘Badge of Honour’ is a wondrously desolate standout. Splicing these ceaselessly aggressive episodes together with exquisitely sculpted lines of snaking fretwork that instantly recalls the deathly panache of Yorkshire doom titans Paradise Lost, theirs is a sound brutal and beguiling in equal measure. Across its every jarring hunk of bludgeoning bass and densely contorted whorl of distortion, ‘Newfound Revelation’ displays a truly staggering enormity of sound. With its wintry implosions of caustic, densely impenetrable screams and violently lurching slabs of distortion driving the listener deeper and deeper into an ink-black abyss of unspeakable horror, there’s no small amount of perverse beauty to be found in its intricately composed array of fretwork. Take, for instance, its frantically accelerating, razor-edged scales, or the deliciously thick spirals of distortion that abound with a deathly elegance and sinewy power quite removed from this earthly realm.
Deftly balancing crushing ultra-violence with intelligent arrangement and meticulous attention to the most richly atmospheric of details, this is darkly immersive doom at its finest.