As the English language continues to become the global lingua franca, it’s heartening that there are bands such as Nachtfalter singing in their native tongue. In fact, the clipped vowels and rolled consonants of the German dialect are the perfect fit for the decidedly dark fusion of rock and metal that they play. After illuminating the blackness with two well-received albums, their third long player, Still(Leben), find this quartet continuing an upward trajectory, creating vast, evocative soundscapes that eagerly await your exploration.
Making the perfect gateway into this album, ‘(Leben)’ is a haunting and ethereal introduction; like a moonlit, haunted cottage in a Grimm fable, it is at simultaneously daunting and awe-inspiring. With keys that fall like snowflakes in a crystalline sky and Tobias Serfling’s authoritative vocals providing the narrative, ‘(Leben)’ is akin to stepping into another world and that’s exactly what happens when the track segues into the following ‘Bodenlos’. Nachtfalter have the ability to create a real sense of place and time with their music, the sonic structures they construct are three-dimensional, so much so that language is no barrier to their meaning; the music and tone of voice conspiring to plant strong images in your mind’s eye. ‘Bodenlos’ being the soundtrack to some uber-cool horror flick.
Nachtfalter are a band in constant motion, songs such as ‘Weiter Weg’ (indeed, the whole album) are peppered with sonic shifts and sudden changes in tempo, the result being quite disorientating, the listener being repositioned and forced to re-evaluate what they’ve heard. It’s an approach that is typical of the album as a whole; with no two songs inhabiting the same sonic space, Still(Leben) has a natural ebb and flow which harks back to the days of old school albums, and while several singles have been culled from this record, it can quite easily be consumed in one sitting. The sombre, funereal ‘Wie das Leben so spielt’ sits next to the electrified ‘Mottentanz’, which in turn nestles beside the grandiose, neo-classical ‘Als du gingst’ quite effortlessly. However, what stitches the album together is a dark aesthetic, a sense of foreboding and unease that swirls around the listener like a spectre.
‘Still’ is an ethereal track to bookend the album and brings things full circle, it’ll haunt you long after the disc has stopped spinning and demands that you press ‘play’ again.
Track List:
- (Leben)
- Bodenlos
- Weiter Weg
- Wie das Leben so spielt
- Mottentanz
- Als du gingst
- Kämpferherz
- Der samtene Vorhang
- Still
