It’s less than a year since their last album, but black metal outfit Aara from Switzerland are already back with a new one. Triade III: Nyx is the band’s long player number five in total and the last part of their trilogy based on the 1820 gothic novel “Melmoth the Wanderer” by Charles Maturin.
You do not need to know the book to enjoy the music, but it does make the listening experience more interesting if you do. The crux of the story is quickly told. The main character, Melmoth, is a scholar who sells his to soul the devil to extend his life for 150 years. The deal seems somewhat less scary to him because of a loophole: If Melmoth finds a successor to the pact, he can get out of it unscathed. But although he spends his life wandering the world in search for such a person, he doesn’t find one. In the end, after an existence of sowing death and ruin, he has to face the devil and meet his end.
Aara’s new album Triade III: Nyx portrays the final part of the story sketched above, where Melmoth has no longer any hopes or any doubts about the ending that awaits him. “Nyx” is the name of the Greek goddess of night and hints at what’s in store for him – an eternity of darkness.
Reviewing the album’s predecessor Triade II – Hemera, I was impressed by the task the band had set themselves, by the choice of their theme and by their execution of the subject so far. Aggressive black metal interlaced with foreboding and melancholic passages did a good job in portraying the storyline. What I was most curious about, however, was how and whether the band would manage to adjust their sound template in order to mirror the main character’s changing circumstances, his growing desperation and the certainty of meeting a supremely awful, unspeakable end. Would they just continue with the established sound mixture, essentially with more of the same, or would they up their game? To me, that seemed necessary and crucial because of the plotline.
After having given the album a few run throughs, I can tell you that Triade III: Nyx is definitely the best album of the trilogy, as it should be. Aara indeed managed to diversify their sound, to make it extremer, and not by dumb or brute force, but in a quite elegant way. How did they do it? Well, they have reduced the slower, contemplative parts to a minimum, only to what’s necessary in order to create atmosphere. What characterises the album instead are densely structured soundscapes dominated by jackhammer drumming, steel cobwebs of guitars and screechy vocals. The mixture is quite intriguing, because although it does not follow the established template for atmospheric black metal, at least not to the full extent, it still manages to transport a wide spectrum of emotions. A very welcome change to the standard fare, if you ask me.
My favourite part, and maybe the albums most convincing piece of music, is the first track, Heimgesucht, where the sound of horse hoofs on cobble stones, the horse drawing a carriage, introduces Melmoth and his wanderings as well as all the doom and the evil travelling with him.
Sweeping, melodic black metal, a notch extremer than usual, portraying one of the darkest tales in literature. Well done.
(8/10 Slavica)
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