Nightshade - Nebula Trance
Self-Financed
Electro Dark Metal
12 songs (53'07)
Release year: 2001
Nightshade
Reviewed by Marc
Surprise of the month

Nightshade is a swiss band that is making its debut with a first self-financed album Nebula Trance. Unusually for a young band, they've already found their own style mixing a lot eletronic elements with power-metal. The voice of the singer is almost clear with a small amount of whispering to it. But its there to support the rest of the melody not create it. Yes, there may be a slight Samael influence but I prefer to call that the "swiss touch".

The electronic part is present in the drums, which use a wide-variety of sounds including some effects (like long snare rolls) and even 1 or 2 breakbeats in one song. The keyboardist seems to be in love with pads, since almost every song has a lot of long, sweepings pad sounds in it. Add to that to that a lot more of synthesizer effects, melodies and bass lines and you can understand why it's called Nebula Trance: good trance music is clearly an influence.

Now if I haven't lost all metal fans by talking about trance, I'll describe the guitar which is direct and effective, in power-metal style. Everything sounds nearly perfect, an absolutely amazing production considering this is a self-financed album. Some bands that I won't name that are signed with labels should listen to that sound and be ashamed.

Off course, this album isn't perfect, the keyboard parts are sometimes too repetitive like on the first track which I didn't like very much, the vocals could be improved a bit and an amazing guitar solo would be nice too. But even with those few bad points I've come to love that album (after a few spins though since its a bit unusual). I also would get killed if I didn't tell you about the great coverart and booklet that were both done by our fellow reviewer Chris!

Although it might be currently difficult to find it, I recommend this album to metalheads with a taste for electronic music or that simply are open-minded enough to listen to any kind of good music.

Killing Songs :
Polaris, Cain's Curse, Ozymandias
Marc quoted 80 / 100
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