Artist: Nights Horn
Country: France
Label: Self-Released
Formats: Digital
Year: 2024
Nights Horn is the brainchild of Thomas Lhairaud, a French multi-instrumentalist and ‘Divina Obscura’ is the work that follows up on the ‘Blood Soul’-demo tape that was released last year. That demo showcased a nice blend of Melodic Black Metal that had a certain Death Metal edge to it, mainly based on the musical heritage of Dissection. Yet, it also had an echo of the melodicism of such acts as Sacramentum or even At The Gates. With ‘Divina Obsura’, however, he takes his project in a different direction…
While there is still an obvious big amount of Dissection going on, there is not much left of the bits and pieces of Death Metal that still typified the demo. Instead, ‘Divina Obscura’ is a full-blown piece of Symphonic Black Metal affair that leans more heavily on such bands as Diabolical Masquerade, Morgul, Old Man’s Child and Gloomy Grim. Nights Horn has the same sort of overwhelming melodicism and, more importantly, a thoroughly musical adventurism. Never on the album things do stay the same for a long time, you are exposed to dizzying dynamics and wild shifts and transitions. So, it is not only the pace that changes all the time, but it is mostly the very prominent keyboards that have a leading role and range from almost conservatively melodic to spacey and enterprising.
The previously released demo, the three songs of which also ended up on this album in a considerably different guise, was already showing some ample potential, but on ‘Divina Obscura’ Lhairaud has definitely outdone himself. His excellent and creative song writing skills and outstanding sense for melody do combine in a tremendously courageous Symphonic Black Metal album. Yes, there is still something that can use a little tweaking, and that is mainly to be found in the overall production of the music – especially the drums sound a bit unnatural still, but this is an album that Lhairaud can be very proud of.
