Following up 2014's Der Totenkopf and last year’s reissue of The New Crimes, Moreno Daldosso’s newest album draws from both his past and present works, resulting in a dark and disturbing record that largely manages to achieve Daldosso’s artistic vision, with the exception of a few missteps along the way.
Nekro is essentially, like many Murder Corporation records, a concept album based around sexual sadism and homicide.These themes are well-trodden staples of the noise/power electronics/death industrial constellation of genres, so I am always skeptical whenever I see them so overtly used by an artist.But like his previous works, Daldosso's approach to this manages to work well.For the most part, Nekro does not come off as insincere juvenile shock tactics that have been overused for the better part of the past 30 plus years, nor do they feel like the ramblings of an actually disturbed individual.Instead, and I know I have used this metaphor before, but the sound is more fitting that of an exploitive horror movie:it is over the topic and teeters on the edge of ridiculous, yet feels self-aware enough to be enjoyable for what it is.
Of the seven pieces that make up this album, the instrumental ones work the best.The opening and ending songs are perhaps the most effective, with the short "Intro" beginning the album appropriately sinister.Hollow electronics underscore what sounds like slightly processed field recordings, with hints of synth noise punctuating a wet sound akin to slogging through a flooded basement.The concluding "Dark Places" is quite literally titled, with a more musical sense of ambience to it.Bleak and awash in echoes, it closes the album on an understated, yet unsettling note.
The middle portions of the album are where the more synth and noise based sounds feature most heavily."Death Race" leads off instantly with brittle, sharp analog noises that shift in volume, with Daldosso pulling the levels back to just come back more intensely.With its minimal structure that magnifies the tiny changes in electronic pitch and rhythms, the piece channels another master of the style, Atrax Morgue, extremely well.The album's lengthy centerpiece, "Roleplay" is 13 uninterrupted minutes of surging, somewhat rhythmic electronic loops that never relent for a second.Even though repetition is the name of the game, that unyielding approach to noise just works extremely well without becoming dull.
The parts where the album does not work as well for me, however, are the similarly structured "Nekro" and "Torture Chamber".Both function more as audio set pieces than actual compositions, with the former overlaying exasperated voices and grunts that could be either of pain or pleasure, while the latter if focused on dialog which I assume was ripped from a simulated torture porn video.I assume this not only because I would not really relish the idea of listening to actual crime audio, but also the "acting" of the male performer is not all that convincing.These two are just a bit too literal for the topic, and Daldosso has proven his ability to set such uncomfortable moods by sound alone, so I feel using dialog is a bit too easy.
With the exception of those two overly blunt pieces, the remainder of Nekro is, like many slasher movies, predictable yet still compelling.I had a good idea of what this album would sound like just from the artist and artwork alone, but the bulk of it was so well executed that it made most of the shortcomings irrelevant.I always knew what to expect growing up from a Friday the 13th movie, too, but that never stopped me from enjoying most of them.
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