Forever remembered as "the death metal band with keyboards," Florida's on-again-off-again Nocturnus is sort of known as being a band with Mike Browning (Morbid Angel, Incubus) but mainly known as being, yeah, the DM band with keys, the weirdos on Grindcrusher who fully rocked a keyboard with no remorse and no regret, and then, upon further exploration, did it all over The Key.
Time has been kind: we chuckled a bit at them back in the day, but now we do things like listen to collections of demos from before The Key came out and think, "Yeah, not bad at all." Which is what this is, and which is what I'm doing: here, even multiple versions of the same song sound good to me, and while it's maybe a bit of nostalgia talking, it's also the raw death metal, the crusted-up demo production, the youthful feel of the songs at hand.
Nocturnus aren't one of the all-time great death metal bands, but they're an all-time interesting footnote and forever will be, and this collection proves that the songs underneath the keyboards were solid. Plus, "BC/AD" is just a damn catchy and memorable song, two adjectives many of their peers never saw too often.
(Nuclear War Now!)Time has been kind: we chuckled a bit at them back in the day, but now we do things like listen to collections of demos from before The Key came out and think, "Yeah, not bad at all." Which is what this is, and which is what I'm doing: here, even multiple versions of the same song sound good to me, and while it's maybe a bit of nostalgia talking, it's also the raw death metal, the crusted-up demo production, the youthful feel of the songs at hand.
Nocturnus aren't one of the all-time great death metal bands, but they're an all-time interesting footnote and forever will be, and this collection proves that the songs underneath the keyboards were solid. Plus, "BC/AD" is just a damn catchy and memorable song, two adjectives many of their peers never saw too often.