By: Anders

Posted: Sep 26, 2006

Spektr has been talked much about the last year or so, though this is my first encounter with the band's music, this is their second full length album. The band delivers an artistic fusing of extreme metal genres en masse, the main base is laid in grim and cold black metal and into that the band blends industrial elements and haunting atmospheres.

The duo has made some really well made compositions that grips the listener immediately, but they still need a good deal of time and dedication to get totally into them and beneath the surface. The 9 tracks on "Near Death Experience" works as one long journey into the darkness of the mind and opens claustrophobic spheres and misanthropic emotions. The fusing of the great black metal riffs, the insane blasting drums and the haunted vocals, together with the cold and mind bending industrial elements of the album works really well. One moment the black metal tones blasts away, for being stopped by a sample, which turns into noisy industrial tones and samples, and like that the music continues to develop, construct and deconstruct itself all the way through the album. Just that fact makes the album one that demands a lot from the listener, it drains and adds energy, moves the emotions, though in the end, the result of the music is very positive, a mental workout in a world of claustrophobic darkness.

"Near Death Experience" is a bombastic adventure from the start to the end, misanthropic and dark, cold and misanthropic. Black metal fused with droning pieces and harsh industrial, it has been done before, just take the last Dødheimsgard album "666 International" and Blut Aus Nord is another merchant for this niche of dark art, Spektr has now entered the elite of these bands with "Near Death Experience", even though they use the drone and industrial elements quite more and often better than the 2 mentioned bands. And on top of the 9 tracks we get a 12 minute video called 'The Near Death Experience (The Screen Method)', which offers black and white images of war, death and destruction in a very abstract and artistic way, and some even more abstract and disturbing elements in between, the music taken from the middle piece of the album fits the images really well, and the music is a lot more hard hitting together with the pictures, the 2 elements together merges into a higher unity and they video track lifts the album and experience a notch, the future has arrived!

Rating: 9/10

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