Review by Sonny for Narbeleth - A Pale Crown (2024)

Ah, Cuba, the home of the world's finest cigars, Twentieth century revolutionaries and the first, although in all probability not the last, potential flashpoint to nuclear armageddon. It is also the original home of Dakkar, the man behind black metal project Narbeleth, although he now calls Galicia in Spain home. It may just be my ignorance showing here, but I never heard of much of a metal scene in Cuba, yet it makes perfect sense for a band like Narbeleth, black metal being pretty much an outsider's style of metal, I would imagine Dakkar being very much an outsider in the Caribbean place of his birth.

Musically, Narbeleth are very much an old-school black metal act, with recognisable and memorable tremolo riffing in the style of luminaries such as Immortal and Satyricon, with a cover of the latter's "The King of the Shadowthrone" even closing out the album. The production isn't as raw as we would have expected from the band's influencers thirty years ago, but the modern production values don't rob the music of any of it's icy aggression and is such that it enables all the constituent parts to be heard clearly. Dakkar has a real ear for a frosty-sounding riff, with his true talent coming in knowing exactly when to throttle back the tempo and when to put his foot down, as it were. This transition between full-on blasting and a more mid-paced tempo provides a lot of the impetus and dynamism in his songwriting and is wielded exceedingly deftly. He also possesses one of those frost-rimed voices that has you imagining visible clouds of icy breath issuing from his lips as he shrieks his occult-heavy lyrics into the night sky.

I would also be remiss of me not to mention the second band member, Vindok, and his supporting role on drums, which he fulfills perfectly, providing a precise battery which injects added impetus to the faster sections and adds depth to the slower tempo parts. Nothing showy, but well-judged and effective black metal skinsmanship. All things considered, I found this to be an immensely enjoyable trip back to the 1990's black metal heyday, with a bit of a modern twist in the higher production values, but that manages to remain authentic-sounding and illustrating perfectly that you don't need to have grown up in the frozen forests of Scandinavia to be able to produce trve black metal frostiness.