TEMPLE OF NIHIL - RUSSIA

TEMPLE OF NIHIL – SCHADENFREUDE – GRIMMDISTRIBUTION  
Temple Of Nihil’s Shadenfreude is an incredibly difficult album to review. The album is certainly extreme, underground and metal, but there is a variety of moods, styles, tempos and sub-genres captured within the one CD and, aside from the aforementioned ferocity, there is little monolithic about it. While a song may be galloping at hyper speeds for a moment, the record slows down to a crawl the next. The band might be savagely throwing distorted riffs at the listener one second and begin acoustic strumming the next. The moods of doom, death and worship are likely present on each track. This, however, is not a progressive or pretentious band. Temple Of Nihil is pure anti-commercial underground metal from start to finish, but it is certainly uneven in delivery.
Overall, this is good stuff as the rating of 70 indicates. There is a good dosage of old Marduk, Dark Funeral and immortal-ish vocals throughout. Snakes in My Skull is Metallian Tower’s favourite track here. It is a raging speedfest that feels like a souped up bullet train smashing through a Metallica concert destroying wimps and idiots alike. There are familiar riffs on this, and other, tracks, but it is more of a matter of inspiration that replication. Postbeing is clearly doom metal. All Turns To Nihil is odd as it ends like a pop song fading out. If there is one aspect of the album that could bear some improvements it is the drumming Nikolay Vykhodtsev who is as intrepid as they come, but has neither a personality of his own nor prominence in the mix. A drummer should be different than a drum machine. With that said, extreme metal fanatics would love this debut by this young band. – Ali “The Metallian”