Already some time after its release date I received a copy of the 2006 debut album Neurasthénie by the Canada based project NIFLHEIM. Another band with only two members, this time a little different from other Black Metal projects as the two guys added a piano and a cello to the standard inventory. Regarding the Canadian releases I had to review in the last months I start to wonder, if there are still “complete” bands with three or even more members out there ;)
Despite the rather rare instrumentation, the two musicians, calling themselves Orion and Neptune are nevertheless unable to create something special on Neurasthénie. As so many minimal staffed projects, NIFLHEIM focus on Suicidal Black Metal. And the result is kind of a pappy and chewy sounding album. Some really nice ideas and fine melancholic tunes can be found, but the problem is, that there is always only one good single idea each song. And when you, on top of that in every song, roll out one single idea to an impressive track length of nearly ten minutes, things start to get boring quickly. Additionally, the singing is also extremely monotonous and the songwriting does not show much diversification as well. The only obvious difference between the songs is the current main theme.
Maybe this creates the intended hypnotic atmosphere for fans of the genre, but for me, such a monotonous album can’t serve as something better than an unobtrusive background sound while I’m reading a book.
At all, the album is not really bad, technically satisfactory and listenable, but it doesn’t contain anything you can’t get from any other average band of this genre.