Nightfall

Athenian Echoes (Holy)
by Joshua Brown

Those who follow the dictum of Black Metal messiahs of years past have unwittingly defiled the very scriptures they adore. They have refused to acknowledge that death is also a metaphor for change, and that pain is fuel for transformation. In so doing, these imitators of heroes have created a genre that was never meant to be. Listening to most ’90s death metal acts is a lot like dying of old age in a sterile hospital bed, condemned to shit into a tube and stare blankly at endless soap operas and Bob Barker’s white head until death is kind enough to finally whisk you away. Where’s the medieval torture, the regurgitation of one’s own digestive tract, the blood and iron, damn it all to Hell?

Nightfall‘s new CD, Athenian Echoes, has made its way from Greece, their homeland, across Europe and to the shores of the New World to answer the call of true heretics. Sometimes they’re dizzyingly fast and use violins for extra percussion, at other times grinding and Gothic with eerie traditional Greek instrumentals mixed in between guitar and guttural vocal assaults. Painfully good production and beautifully evil arrangements add up to a fierce directive: Long live the spirit of early, mid-’80s Black/Death, and let us explore newly perverse depths of the predatory animal in us all in the last half of the last decade of the twentieth century.