Ecnephias - Dominium Noctis cover artwork

Rating: 7.666

Country: Italy

Release Date: 2006

Track list:
1. Arcanum Mysterium (Belli Preludium)
2. Burn Witch Burn! (The Saint Inquisition)
3. Veneficia (Voluptas Animi)
4. Between Shadows (The Evil Lies)
5. Ice Forest Rituals (The Twilight)
6. Dominium Noctis (Conventum et Striga)
7. Under the Sign of the Archangel
8. Ragnatele su Velluto Scarlatto
9. Pleasure and Pain (The Violence)
10. To the Forgotten (The Nature Speaks)
11. Notte a Craco

Band Website: Ecnephias

Ecnephias - Dominium Noctis

Mancan: All vocals and guitars
Atlos: Drums & percussions, key programming
Akeron: Bass

For today's review I'll be venturing slightly outside of my main fields of expertise, as I review the Italian occult sounding death metal band Ecnephias. Ecnephias play a brand of metal that straddles the line between death, black and doom metal with a good helping of cinematic keys, while staying centered in death metal territory with churning tremolo riffs and slow, oppressive doom chords of the early Morbid Angel and Necrophobic schools of riff spawning. They also give thanks to Chuck Schuldiner in the liner notes, so one can look forward to nods to early Death in the guitar department as well. The mainly guttural, gurgled vocals are occasionally switched up for a more black metal rasp and a slightly awkward sounding clean voice, while the drums are played in a pleasantly competent old-school death metal style, thumping mid-paced for the most part with the occasional speedy blast to provide some extra energy.

The thing that sets Ecnephias apart from most current death metal is the atmosphere created in large part thanks to the synths and effects, which give it the earlier mentioned occult sound. This occult atmosphere and the overlap with the black metal genre makes it so that Ecnephias is only directly comparable to a small handful of bands, namely very early Bal-Sagoth (the debut mainly), Eminenz (their first two full-lengths) and the more recent Necros Christos. Indeed, like the three mentioned bands Ecnephias contains its fair share of cheese, a heaping handful of it, but damnit, its fun as hell in a still epic and dark way! It also works in their favor that they have that unmistakable South European vibe, which brings the early Greek masters to mind as well as the starting albums of their country mates Mortuary Drape and Opera IX. The thing I really like about this album is the old aura it projects; if this didn't have such a nice production, I wouldn't have been surprised if this was an early, obscure death metal demo from '85. It just exudes that old-school, occult and satanic death metal charisma.

This doesn't expand the boundaries of extreme metal into ludicrous new territories, nor does it make pretentious as fuck statements about the philosophical implications of the existence of Evil. What it does do is provide one thick, heavy slab of blackened death metal in a dark, lush and cinematic style that even the Greek trinity has largely abandoned. It's just damn fun, inventive and varied and makes me bang my head like a lunatic! Ecnephias plays in a style that is largely forgotten and is in that respect a massive breath of fresh air. It's slightly juvenile, but seriously, the day when extreme metal 'grows up' is the day it ceases to be metal and therefore extreme metal needs genuinely old-school bands like this as much as it needs hyper-serious modern boundary smashers.

April 23rd, 2008