Time marches ever forward and can not be escaped even if you are a time travelling satanic robot or a gigabrained astral space being. Nocturnus are an act that have shaped early extreme metal and progressive metal alike, being forerunners in larger scale writing in extreme metal. They also pioneered the usage of icy, cheese filled synth pads whose unquestioned overuse by second wave black metal artists shaped the sound of an entire decade of underground metal. While keyboards became a universal trope among the church burning aficionados, they would never be applied to death metal in the same way Nocturnus did, barring a few oddball examples. The inclusion of ethereal pads did not mean Nocturnus were going to soften their sound and the inherent clash of tones is what made the band interesting – Nocturnus were the type of band just below the surface, ready to be discovered and if parts of it were a little weird, that was part of the “underground” appeal (if we can call a band sporting former members of Morbid Angel that managed to get their debut signed to Earache underground at all).
Nocturnus AD, on the other hand, can’t really benefit from that sort of viewpoint. This new entity of the band is a classic act that returns to serve up the same goodness one more time. The band does make an effort to reiterate most of what made them good. The jagged guitar lines that often suggest odd time signatures where there are none, the surprisingly bright yet abrasive tonality and the subtle technicality of the material are still present. Unicursal doesn’t fail to reach the same standards for a lack of trying, but for the new context I have to view it in. A lot of what Nocturnus AD do here has not aged particularly well. The production is maybe a tad cleaner, but still lacks impact. Part of that is the drum production which eschews modern trends and seems both relatively dry and unaltered, but also the chosen keyboard sounds that often muddle up the guitars in a way that would have dictated a more active approach in editing them after the recording stage. The absence of a guiding hand further complicates things as another issue presents itself in the scale of the album. Unicursal is long and unnecessarily so. “Intro” and “Outro” taken together already add up to almost seven minutes and further bloat is present throughout the album. The most egregious is the opening to “Mesolithic” with its potentially culturally insensitive, repetitive tribal drumming. I could see about 30 seconds of it making sense, but the indulgence of a band no longer bound by the vinyl record’s structuring limitations on full display, subjecting us to almost 2 minutes of it. The final element of the album that has not aged well are the vocals. Nocturnus’ vocals were always an underperforming not-quite growl, but on Unicursal, Mike Browning reduces their harshness even more. The vocals can at times feel too uncommited to the death metal style, and their increased legibility makes the lyrics land awkwardly as they rely on increasingly blunt rhyming schemes (“I find myself in a crater, deep as an ocean floor/Where I see a tunnel, that I must explore”). It was always the sheer audacity and scale of the story told that made an album like The Key good, not the lyrics, and showcasing this is not a good move.
I am more conflicted about rating this album than the review, and its admittedly rather negative tone, might suggest. On some level, I do enjoy what Nocturnus AD are doing here. A lot of the writing is very on point and for every section I criticize, like the opening to Mesolithic, I can highlight one from the same song that is among my most favorite material from this year. Still, I cannot help but feel I wouldn’t need to search long to find progressive death metal that does things similar to Unicursal and does it better. Good progressive death metal doesn’t release too often, but there is enough to choose from. Even considering how I have changed between discovering this legendary act and now, and the fact that I might be harsher to Nocturnus than I’d be if this were a band of newcomers, I just have to admit that Unicursal is not as good as The Key. With anything as weird as The Key, it has to have been lightning in a bottle. The flaws of The Key are excusable because it is not only an album, but a cultural artifact being representative of a time in death metal that we are now far away from. Unicursal is not that, and it can’t be.
