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The duo Nonsun from Lviv, Ukraine, started about a year ago, is willing to present to an audience their debut EP “Good Old Evil”. Presently, they didn’t just spring up out of nowhere like from the jack-in-box, so I should note that the guy who shouts and plays almost all the instruments - Goatooth, besides Nonsun, also roars in death doom metal band Apostate. I’m not sure if Alpha, who grinds on drums, has any experience, but I bet that he played somewhere before as well. The guys gathered with the purpose to bring their own vision of experimental drone and sludge doom to the underground audience, and how they’ve coped with that, let’s look. The release has only four tracks, but they last nearly 50 minutes, so you may conclude, how thoughtfully and thoroughly the album was written. "Jesus’ Age" lasts about 18 minutes, and both the ragged growl and the stubborn, as slow as possible riffing with an easy swing begin a piece of the painful sludgy doom, quickly breaking and ceding to a drone-improvisation. This retreat does not last long, and again comes back the droney groove, this time decorated with a sudden psychedelic solo - somehow short and thinnish, as if it got there by accident, the groove again removed by a longer drone-improvisation, which, however, at the end was swept away by driven distorted attack ... what is it all about, guys? Intergenre transitions within one track nevertheless need to have borders, but in case of "Jesus’ Age" they’re barely noticeable, and Nonsun are shamelessly jumping from one chair to another, not really taking any of them. However the dudes gave out a powerful, deafening post-sludge monolith on their second track "Rain Have Mercy" (despite two-minutes long ambient entry). And this is completely other thing! The track captures the attention entirely: the fat spacey sound produces an unreal heat, the moderate slowed-down melody pleasantly tickles the nerves, the drums rhythmics sets an excellent driving pace, the growl finally found a decent application, and he’s roaring the quite decent lyrics!
The acoustic interlude sounds organically within the melody, and the track partly, apparently, was born as a result of Goatooth’s experience with Apostate, you can hear some death-doom there too. The excited flight breaks by an accidentally recorded in the studio white noise - behind the grand title "Message of Nihil Carried By The Waves Of The Big Bang" hides some really stuffy noise... Does this track have some artistic value? This question is not for me, I did not see it. Last track of the release "Forgotten Is What Never Was" begins with the same noisey crackle but it is supported with the good piano samples, oppressive and doomed, soon followed by the extremely distorted guitars and drums. These elements, gradually connecting together, produce a strong, extremely dark doom track. The piano is replaced by an organ, the drums are ticking an inexorable course of time - or these are the approaching footsteps of something relentless, terrible and dirty... We’re notified about it’s arrival in the seventh minute by a torn inhuman growl, after which sounds a quiet, barely audible, tune. This is the truest dark ritual! The curtain falls.
In my opinion, as a result we have one excellent track ("Rain Have Mercy"), one efficiently written and overall quite good ("Forgotten Is What Never Was"), one confusing, with a couple of veiled good ideas ("Jesus’ Age") and one seemingly-no-clue-how-it-got-here ("Message of Nihil Carried By The Waves Of The Big Bang"). For this first release, say, okay, but the work absolutely lacks integrity and sounds like a compilation, so after listening, one question remains: what will happen next? Let’s wait for the next release and find out.
Words:
AleksYouTubeFacebookBandcamp
