Album Review: Nuctemeron - Demonic Sceptre
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I can’t afford to lose more of my hairline, and I want Nuctemeron to know that I hold them and their insalubrious speed-freak devilry personally responsible for the additional four inches of formerly fabulous follicles I am now bereft of, blasted as it was clean off my skull by their occult tomfoolery. I had ringlets once, cherubic and flowing. Now I look like a fucking thumb. Ah well. The receding runs strong in my family, and in truth all Nuctemeron have done is speed along a process already long afoot. Given that the hand of fate already had a future as a cue ball in store for me, there’s only so much ire my heart may hold for the band. I suppose, then, that the question really worth the asking is: “Are Nuctemeron worth the deforestation job they’ve given me?”.
Imagine thrash metal – but the earliest examples. Masterworks like “Kill ‘em All” and “Show No Mercy” wherein the debt owed to classic heavy metal was obvious and unabashed. Then accelerate. Accelerate to the point that from a standing start the voyager probes will be coughing up your space dust inside a minute. Add in a vocalist that screams like he’s using hornets for suppositories, a Paul Baloff on bath salts type that shrieks like he’s stuck in a phone booth with a polar bear. Riffs that scrabble with the boundless skittish energy of an electric gibbon, and the dread magnificence of that spiky sandpaper distortion we all know and love from the fledgling efforts of Destruction or Kreator. A puglistic cardiovascular ordeal of a drum performance somewhere between an amphetamine rampage and a hate crime against a snare. When it all comes together, you more or less have the blueprint for classic speed metal. Or at least I think you do, “speed metal” and “thrash metal” seem to be close enough to be synonymous much of the time, to the point that Dave Mustaine calls Megadeth speed metal in the liner notes for the “Rust in Peace” remaster. I’m not sure I understand the distinction between the two, but there’s an extent to which it’s unimportant, because one concrete determination that I can make with crystal clarity is that “Demonic Sceptre” is metal as fuck.
There’s something in the way Germans do this sort of stuff. The band understands that anything worth doing is worth doing quickly, and apart from the odd breather taken largely to snort 4 mile lines of coke cut with cayenne pepper tempo distinctions are largely between “fast” and “faster”. They play like they thought “Angel of Death” was drone metal, slamming into cuts like “Burn my Skin to Leather” as though hell itself snaps at their heels. The following sentence makes no sense but is true nonetheless: cheese is metal. It’s why something potentially ridiculous – like “The Bat” having a chorus in which the sole lyrics are the word “BAT” screamed at you over and over – effortlessly swerves clear of any sardonic mockery I could derisively lob at it. The directness and unashamed passion of it is just awesome, every note, every lyric is slam-fired out with absolute conviction – and it’s irresistibly engaging on account of it. It doesn’t go out of it’s way to be catchy but any song titled “Fuck Off!!!(in the Name of Evil)” can’t help but have an infectious chorus. Nor is the playing exactly airtight, but it brims with such rambunctious enthusiasm that I just couldn’t find it in myself to care. They attack the music with such fervour that one might think it had done them personal harm – take the bass for example; hear it open “Burn My Skin to Leather”, hear it being thrashed to within a planck length of it’s life. Nuctemeron’s bass duties are fulfilled by someone calling themselves “Volcanic Slut”, and she plays with the untold aggression of a woman who splices ghost pepper extract into her vagisil.
With that said, there is a thimble’s worth of setbacks. I wasn’t sold on the ambient intro, nor would the cover of Venom’s “Angel Dust” float my boat if I had one to float. For the intro, the chief sin is irrelevancy in an otherwise exhilarating album – the 2nd track (“The Bat”) has a moment of spooky ambient jimmy-rustling at the beginning anyway, which is well enough to set the scene before the rest of this fucking thing kicks your bollocks off and replaces your spinal fluid with Dr Pepper. A full track of it feels surplus to requirements, and despite having spun this album more times than the earth has rotated I’ve never failed to skip that introduction once a first listen granted me the full measure of it. The “Angel Dust” cover is fine of itself, but the band seems to be playing it note for note, as opposed to adapting it into something more demonstrative of their talents than it is Venom’s. I like Angel Dust (the song is pretty good too) but if a cover is to be done, it seems to me best that the cover version do something that the original did not, becoming almost more a homage to the original than a retelling of it. Space allotted to a clone generally feels (to me at least) as though it would be better used to display original material – in particular when that original material is as fiery as this.
That those two tracks open and close the album is unfortunate, but as the good lord saw fit to bless us with a skip button, I can only implore you to make use of it. Besides that, if you consider yourself a thrash metal fan, or a speed metal fan (doubly so if you enjoy the shrill “one more degree on the treble knob and this is black metal” branch of the genre) then do not permit Demonic Sceptre to pass you by. While I doubt it’ll reorganise your perceptions of what’s possible within thrash (or speed, or whatever the fuck it is) I defy each and every one of you to resist the impassioned, hellacious momentum this band toy with. This is music by people who think metal is the coolest thing ever, for people who think metal is the coolest thing ever. I couldn’t be more the target audience if I painted a bullseye on my forehead. So, Nuctemeron – if you’re reading this - while I curse thee and all blighted scions of thine bloodline for the crimes thy hands hath wrought upon my hairline...I can’t stay mad at you. This album is – moderate quibbles notwithstanding – incredible fun, and your life will be better for listening to it.
