After giving Spectral Lore’s album ‘III’ the top spot in my end of year rankings for 2014, I was, as you might expect, pretty bloody delighted to hear recently that they were planning to release a split at some point around the end of the year. In fact, the digital and vinyl versions have both been released about a month earlier than expected with the vinyl version on the way in mid-January. Let me just say, Spectral Lore and Nachtreich are ideally suited for a split with both adapting slightly to cater for the very individual mood of this split and complimenting each other perfectly. Without giving too much away at this point, its perfect fodder for the time of year as the bleak mid-winter really begins to set in. Oddly for a split the tracks are not divided into two halves but with a little more collaboration and thought as you might hope from a couple of black metal outfits that are clearly a few notches above the ordinary. The end product is a piece of music that can be dissected and analysed as the work of two master craftsmen in a demonstration of their comparable styles and skills or as something so seamless it could almost be taken as a single piece of work by one band.
If it’s not obvious, both outfits (Nachtreich being a two man band and Spectral Lore, just one) have that pagan-spiritual essence to their work but with a fine, classical edge. The latter aspect is exemplified by the piano-led border-line waltz by Nachtreich (although better heads than mine tell me its too slow to be an actual waltz as well as being in a four-by-four rhythm rather than triple time…) that nicely introduces us to the tone of this six-track piece of work. A piece of music that you’d have to be dead (or at least dead against any kind of music that wasn’t totally amplified) not to be pulled in by. There are some fine distinctions between the two, for example, Nachtreich clearly focuses on the use of very classical piano and violin arrangements while the more intense moments, although often still backed up by acoustic instruments, tend to be delivered by Spectral Lore. But both artists switch and alternate to produce something that is both totally absorbing and musically profound even before Spectral Lore’s Ayloss begins to pull out all the stops.
There are points when you find yourself caught in a reverie, then, just when they’ve got you right where they want you, things begin to build up, like on the second track when Spectral Lore uses the same piano-violin interplay to very different effect than the first – both uplifting and sombre at the same time and then going increasingly dark before slicking the switch on the amplification and those intense trademark tremolo riffs. So, without giving a blow by blow account, things develop in a fairly non linear way then climb towards those gradual and carefully constructed climax that no Spectral Lore release (and, it turns out, but perhaps to more subtle degrees, Nachtreich) would be without. If this is what these two guys can produce as a side project in between albums then, frankly, they’re putting a lot of genre-confined atmospheric black metal bands in the shade. An utterly compelling and moving collaboration.
(9/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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