Not to be confused with the occult/doom-lite Swedish band Noctum currently signed to Metal Blade (previously reviewed here), Valencia's Noctem have bubbled up through a brief series of underground labels to burst through the surface with their Prosthetic debut, Exilium.
This Noctem has been kicking around slightly longer than their vowel-differentiated namesakes, having released a couple of demos and even an independently released live album dating back to 2002 before finally dropping Divinity on obscure Austrian label Noisehead in 2009. Their catchy, uptempo style of old school death metal was bound to catch on eventually; it doesn't so much fit overlap with metalcore/deathcore as it shares sympathetic influences. The word "blackened" comes up a lot in PR transcripts and reviews of the band alike, but the trendy descriptor is generally more apt at capturing their balls-to-the-wall velocity than in chronicling their almost chipper lack of somber atmospherics. This is pit-driven death metal, through and through.
"Tiamat's Crown" is representative of this salt-of-the-earth approach, the crisp blast beats and memorably snappy guitar riffs gleefully conjuring the heyday of the Gothenburg scene. Other tracks such as "The Rising Horns" and "Halo of Repugnance" display an instrumental virtuosity that flirts with tech death, avoiding the latter's stop-start time changes and often disjointed riffs in favor of a more fluid, song-based approach.
Daniel Cardoso (Anathema) does a stellar job behind the mixing boards, polishing Noctem's sharply articulated delivery to a high sheen. In fact, if there's one disqualifier toward the whole "blackened" appellation it's that this band is too clean. Which isn't a problem as long as false impressions aren't being bandied about… comfortably straddling the line between the technical and brutal sub-genres of death metal, Noctem is all about the brutality, razor-sharp playing and instantly memorable riffs dominating, with any malevolence or atmosphere generated coming from their clinical precision and dogged sense of purpose.
Late into the album the band start to mix things up, with "Eidolon" and "The Adamantine Doors" attempting to earn that blackened label with keyboards, acoustic interludes and haunting choir vocals, but even these songs are largely dominated by the instrumental prowess which is writ large over the entire album. At any rate, in closing out the sequencing they provide sharp relief on an album that has heretofore displayed a stubborn resistance to variety.
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