Nocturnus

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Nocturnus
General information
origin Tampa , Florida , United States
Genre (s) Death metal , technical death metal
founding 1987, 1999
resolution 2002, 2002
Last occupation
Mike Davis
Louis tank
Electric guitar
 Sean McNenney
E-bass , later also vocals
Emo Mowery
Chris Bieniek
former members
Electric bass
 Richard Bateman
Drums, initially also vocals
 Mike Browning
Electric guitar
 Gino Marino
Electric guitar
 Vincent Crowley
Electric bass
 Jeff Estes
Drums
 James Marcinek
singing
 Dan Izzo
Drums
 Rick Bizarro
Electric bass
 Jim O'Sullivan
E-Bass (Session)
 Chris Anderson

Nocturnus was an American death metal band from Tampa , Florida that was formed in 1987 and disbanded in 1993. From 1999 to 2002 the band was briefly active again.

history

The band was formed in 1987 by drummer and singer Mike Browning. He had previously worked for Morbid Angel from 1984 to 1986 and then briefly founded the band Incubus. A self-titled demo was released in 1987, which was followed by The Science of Horror in 1988 . Gino Marino can be heard as guitarist on both demos. As another guitarist Vincent Crowley can be heard on the first demo before he was replaced by 18-year-old Mike Davis. Crowley later founds Acheron . Starting bassist Richard Bateman, who later joined Nasty Savage , was replaced by Jeff Estes on the second demo. In September 1988, before the recording of the second demo, Louis Panzer, a keyboardist who was a friend of one of the guitarists and the bassist Estes was added. Panzer had nothing to do with the death metal scene before, but was interested in different styles of music. The age of the members ranged from 18 to 24 years in the initial phase. Through the demo The Science of Horror , the band got a contract with Earache Records . This originally applied to the release of four albums. In addition to the label, Peaceville Records was interested in the band, but it had been rejected by Combat Records , Roadracer Records and Noise Records . Combat Records took over distribution after the contract was signed. After Sean McNenney had replaced the guitarist Marino, the debut album The Key was released in 1990 . Backing vocals by Kam Lee (ex- Massacre ) can be heard on the recording . It was produced by Tom Morris . Over 50,000 units of the album were sold worldwide. After that, Estes left the cast. O'Sullivan joined for the following tour with Bolt Thrower . The tour was followed by a 50-gig US tour with Godflesh and Napalm Death . On the 1992 album Threshold Browning focused exclusively on playing the drums, which is why Dan Izzo joined as a singer. Chris Anderson was hired as session bass player for the recordings. Then Emo Mowery came to the band, who occupied this position permanently. The album didn't sell quite as well as its predecessor. A music video was created for the song Alter Reality . The band lost their contract with Earache Records afterwards, because of disagreements between the label and the members. After touring with Confessor , Browning and the other members broke up. He then joined Acheron. Remaining members secured the rights to the name "Nocturnus", although Browning had founded the band. The band then tried to replace him with James Marcinek, but it came to a breakup in 1993. Shortly before, the group had recorded a self-titled EP , which was released on Moribund Records that same year . After the dissolution, the members devoted themselves to other things, so Panzer devoted himself to his psychology studies .

Browning later worked on various projects and founded the band Nocturnus AD in 1999 with guitarists Marino and Mike Walkowski and bassist Richard Bateman. A short time later, however, the name was changed to After Death , as Nocturnus had meanwhile been revived and made up of guitarists Davis and McNenney , the keyboardist Panzer, the drummer Rick Bizarro and the bassist Mowery, who now also took over the vocals. In 1999 the album Ethereal Tomb was released through Season of Mist . At the beginning of May 2002 it was finally dissolved. In October 2008, After Death played gigs in the UK playing songs from The Key as well as old Morbid Angel songs. In 2013 Browning founded a band again under the name Nocturnus AD, although it was not a continuation of the band Nocturnus, which continued after him. Rather, this was a continuation of the band Nocturnus that existed at the time of The Key with the members of After Death. The band made their first appearance in May 2014 at the Maryland Deathfest .

style

According to laut.de , Nocturnus was one of the first death metal bands to integrate keyboards into their sound from the start. If this was frowned upon at the time, many bands would now also do so. rockdetector.com wrote that the band was one of the pioneers of keyboard heavy technical death metal . UMUR from progarchives.com also wrote that the band was the first in death metal to use keyboards. The songs initially dealt with topics such as occultism , before later devoting themselves to science fiction .

Matthias Herr wrote in his third edition of the Heavy Metal Lexicon that Browning initially describes his music as " Technical Death Metal with Scientific Horror Themes". He got the inspiration to use a keyboard from old Mercyful Fate songs. According to Herr, the keyboard on They Key gives a death metal album a symphonic character for the first time and the keyboardist is the focus for the first time. The album sounds hard, dramatic and bizarre, with tense structures and " Carpenterian dramaturgy". The lyrics would sound influenced by John Sinclair and Perry Rhodan and would occasionally deal with satanic motifs. Songs like Neolithic, on the other hand, would thematize evolution , with the band also processing Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory . In an interview with Jon Kristiansen , Browning stated that he wrote most of the lyrics.

Martin Popoff wrote about They Key in The Collector's Guide of Heavy Metal Volume 3: The Nineties , that complex music can be heard on it, which surpasses the aggressiveness of the Florida band Nasty Savage. For Popoff's taste the music is too exaggerated, which makes it less enjoyable. The band makes use of tempo changes in their songs . He found the band odd, above most aggressive progressive metal bands he knew. He is also impressed by the use of a full-time keyboardist, although he can only be heard in places due to the strong background noise. On Thresholds , the band showed that they were ahead of their time. The music is meaner Death Metal that sounds dirtier and inflammatory. The singing sounds "barked". The music is still progressive in places and sounds like a more modern version of Thrash Metal from the San Francisco Bay Area or like more technically demanding slayers .

In an interview with Thomas Meyer in Fanzine Revelation , Browning stated that he usually gets his ideas for the texts from books and films. He wants to shock with his songs, emphasizing that these are only fictional songs. As in horror films like The Exorcist , the shock elements are used for entertainment. His favorite bands were Morbid Angel, Watchtower , Pestilence and Necrodeath .

Götz Kühnemund from Rock Hard wrote in his review of The Key that you can hear brutal Death Metal paired with keyboards used throughout. He found the lyrics to be childish and silly. The music is not a Morbid Angel copy. Not only is the use of a keyboard unusual, but also the dominant role of the lead guitar . In a later edition Marcel Schäfer reviews Ethereal Tomb and called the band a "Techno-Deather". He also concluded that the debut album was a genre classic that was still unmatched. Thresholds could not quite build on that. In Ethereal Tomb but someone should "designed filigree, under painted with comprehensive key sounds and dominated by speedy guitar riffs no death metal sound " expect. The speed is never really high in the songs. One issue later Kühnemund wrote in an article about the band that despite the keyboards there is "[k] a trace of poppy Gothic elements of bombastic bombast". The first two albums were "great moments of technically demanding Death Metal". On the third album there are powerful old school death metal shouts . From the second album onwards, the band got rid of satanic themes and dedicated themselves to science fiction, fantasy and horror .

Petra Schurer from Metal Hammer noted that Nocturnus, together with Sadist , Pestilence and Cynic , had shaped technical death metal in the early 1990s. In another issue Robert Müller reviewed The Key and also emphasized that this is the first death metal band with permanent keyboard use, which means "scary intros for almost all songs and always weird nasty noises behind the guitar orbits". The structure of the songs in particular makes them exciting, which "mainly consists of nervously hectic chewing around on a sound idea and sudden breaks in which, in the light of strange keyboard sounds, real cascades of iridescent weird guitar sounds emerge". In his later album review of Thresholds , Müller was disappointed, since it is now ordinary Death Metal. On the sound carrier the group quotes from They Key in a clumsy way , although one can still hear in the songs that it is Nocturnus. His namesake Stefan Müller noted that in Ethereal Tomb "a sluggish groove , fat guitars and keyboards that unfortunately don't sound as original as they used to" can be heard. The songs would move almost exclusively in the medium speed range.

Discography

  • 1987: Nocturnus (demo, self-published)
  • 1988: The Science of Horror (demo, self-published)
  • 1990: The Key (album, Earache Records )
  • 1992: Thresholds (album, Earache Records)
  • 1993: Nocturnus (EP, Moribund Records)
  • 2000: Ethereal Tomb (album, Season of Mist )
  • 2004: The Nocturnus Demos (compilation, Karmageddon Media )
  • 2004: Farewell to Planet Earth (DVD, self-published)
  • 2014: The Science of Horror (compilation, Nuclear War Now! Productions )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Biography. (No longer available online.) Rockdetector.com, archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on November 22, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rockdetector.com
  2. ↑ a b c d UMUR: Nocturnus biography. progarchives.com, accessed November 22, 2015 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Nocturnus. laut.de , accessed on November 21, 2015 .
  4. ^ A b Jon Kristiansen : Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries . Brooklyn, NY: Bazillion Points Books 2011, p. 203
  5. ^ A b Matthias Herr: Matthias Herr's Heavy Metal Lexicon Vol. 3 . Verlag Matthias Herr, 1991, p. 91 f .
  6. ↑ Jason Ankeny: Nocturnus. Allmusic , accessed November 22, 2015 .
  7. ↑ a b c Thomas Meyer: Nocturnus . In: Revelation . No. 2 , May 1991, pp. 30th ff .
  8. ↑ a b c Colin Larkin: The Guinness Who's Who of Heavy Metal Second Edition . Guinness Publishing, Enfield, Middlesex, England 1995, ISBN 0-85112-656-1 , pp. 255 .
  9. ↑ a b Götz Kühnemund : Nocturnus . The Key. In: Rock Hard . No. 45 , December 1990, p. 52 .
  10. ↑ Biography. season-of-mist.com, accessed November 22, 2015 .
  11. ↑ a b c Götz Kühnemund: Death Metal Innovators . Nocturnus. In: Rock Hard . No. 155 , April 2000, p. 132 .
  12. ↑ After Death. afterdeath666.com, accessed November 22, 2015 .
  13. ↑ Info. Facebook , accessed November 22, 2015 .
  14. ↑ Martin Popoff : The Collector's Guide of Heavy Metal Volume 3: The Nineties . Collectors Guide Ltd, Burlington, Ontario, Canada 2007, ISBN 978-1-894959-62-9 , pp. 318 .
  15. ↑ Marcel Schäfer: Nocturnus . Ethereal Tomb. In: Rock Hard . No. 154 , March 2000, p. 93 .
  16. ↑ Petra Schurer: Sadist . Dark trailblazers. In: Metal Hammer . May 2010, p. 80 .
  17. ^ Robert Müller: Nocturnus . The Key. In: Metal Hammer . December 1990, p. 59 .
  18. ^ Robert Müller: Nocturnus . Thresholds. In: Metal Hammer . June 1992, p. 67 .
  19. ^ Stefan Müller: Nocturnus . Ethereal Tomb. In: Metal Hammer . February 2000, p. 100 .