NYX : "Home"

The Myrkr album got lots of recognition for being female led black metal, so it would be a damn shame if this darker heavier female duo from Germany didn't get at least a fraction of that praise, because they might possibly be better. They start off with a blast and evolve into a convincing chug. With vocals that sound more agonized that angry, in a depressive black metal vein. With spoken word parts that remind me of one of my favorite bands the late great Fear of God. There is clean singing , it is not as folky or operatic as Myrkur. More along the lines of Rasputina. The second song just kind of falls out of the first and is less black metal going into more melodic places. They touch back upon black metal midway into the song. Drummer Blitz takes a somewhat different approach having more in her arsenal than just blast beats. Her only weakness is she does hit as hard and the double bass is more of a patter than thunder. This could be a production issue. The production is not too raw or too polished with Enthroned's bassist Phorgath at the helm. The third song is "Chaos Part 38" so there are eighteen parts of chaos in-between this and the second song which was the twentieth part of chaos, but i suppose you can't count on chaos to follow a logical progression. They get heavier on this part a punk infused black n roll no unlike Carpathian Forest.

There is a bigger and slow chug to the epic "Save Our Souls". The double bass sounds better here so it might have been a production issue earlier. This drops down into a chant before slamming back into the metal. "Deep" is birthed out of this song with no clear break. It is more atypical black metal with a few cool accents and in the last two minutes they redeem themselves and add a sung section with creepier atmosphere. The chug to "Going On" feels like they are delving deeper into the darkness until the blast off into the blast beats and return to this meaner gallop. Their are sublime moments of dissonance around the edges of some of their riffs.The title track is a more straightforward snarl fest that fluctuates between the blast and the drilling tremolo until it slows down a minute and a half into things. For a chick she has a pretty convincing snarl that blows away the girl from False, I suppose since black metal growls are higher than death metal growls they are a little easier for women to pull off. The vocals are effective as an accent for the guitar melodies to come in and work their way around.

 They cool thing about a female duo making a metal album is they bring a much different energy and perspective than their male counterpart as I could not hear their male counterparts making the type of folk that they do on "Swallowed Screaming" which in contrast to the rest of the album is rather...well poppy despite the lyrics and the random screams they throw in the back ground . Overall this album is more metal than "M" which I liked but suspect I'll get more milage out of this one so for that reason I am going to round this up to a 10.