Reviews list for Necrophobic - The Nocturnal Silence (1993)

Necrophobic are yet another band I have been ignorant of up until listening to this, the Swedes' debut album, for the Horde's death metal the first decade clan challenge. I guess I was expecting something akin to Entombed's first couple of albums, but instead Necrophobic have thrown me a bit of a curveball by including black metal elements within their death metal assault and, I've got to say, I'm quite impressed. I don't want to try and oversell the black metal elements because this is definitely a death metal album, but they are noticeable and the inclusion of those elements does make for something a bit different compared to the other death metal releases I have been listening to from this period in time. Blackened death metal is a well-established sub-genre nowadays, of course, and there are a legion of releases under the umbrella, but I guess this is one of the earlier examples.

They do have that overdriven Swedish guitar sound as employed by the likes of Entombed, but it is tempered by the blackened elements with the extra treble giving it a bit more clarity. That said, it does provide the listener with a damn good bludgeoning in true death metal style and doesn't lack for heaviness in any way, even when guitarist David Parland introduces a bit more melody into the riffs the brutal guitar tone still delivers a damn good beating to the listener's eardrums. The slight downside to this and an issue I have with a number of Swedish death metal releases, is that the guitar is so all-pervasive that I feel the rhythm section takes too much of a back seat and at times the bass in particular is swamped by that overpowering guitar tone.

Vocalist Anders Strokirk singing voice sits somewhere between a shrieking, barking black metal style and the more gutteral, growling vocals of death metal derivation, leaning a bit more to the black side. Lyrically and thematically they also embrace the anti-Christian path so beloved by black metal bands of the time with their blasphemous and satanic lyrical exhortations. The songwriting is strong, the tracks seem to strike a great balance between the brutal and the melodic, being both detructively heavy and memorable at the same time. A track such as Sacrificial Rites even hints at a heavy Slayer influence and at times sounds like it wouldn't be out of place on Reign In Blood. The death and black metal elements combine well to provide something that sets Necrophobic apart from the early-90's Scandinavian pack. The Swedish sound is not my favourite iteration of death metal, but with the addition of aspects of black metal Necrophobic seem to have found the formula to making it more interesting, to my ears at least.

It's been many years since I've revisited Swedish death metallers Necrophobic's 1993 debut album "The Nocturnal Silence" but I still find it to be a very solid piece of work. Whilst you'll harbor very few doubts that they hail from Swedish origins once the needle hits the wax, Necrophobic (who were led by Dark Funeral guitarist Blackmoon) had a lot more feathers in their caps than many of their contemporaries & you'll hear all sorts of influences popping up here as they do their very best to name drop almost every great death/thrash/black metal band of the early 1990's & do it all with great aplomb too.

The early Necrophobic sound seems to have been put together by combining the various different elements they were hearing from their local Stockholm scene at the time as far as I can see. You had the classic old-school death metal of Dismember, the melodic black metal of Dissection & the melodic death metal of Unanimated, all fused together & mixed in with regular Bathory references & one-off hints at international acts like Death, Deicide, Obituary, Bolt Thrower, Slayer, Emperor, etc. In fact, I'd suggest that they've borrowed their evil lyrical themes & imagery from Dissection & Deicide too if I'm not mistaken. I wouldn't say that this results in a product that's particularly focused or well defined but the band certainly had the skills to pull it off &, when combined with a production job that offers a good balance of underground rawness & melodic clarity, the result is a fairly accessible yet energetic extreme metal release that's tailor made for an audience that favours a melodic, crunchy & undeniably Swedish brand of death metal.

For fans of Dissection, Unanimated & Dismember.