Necronomicon
Peccata Mundi
Hammerheart
Necronomicon, eh? Unfathomably, some serious metal amnesia must have ensnared the minds of these Swedish metallers, because there’ve been not one, not two, but three Necromicons in just as many decades: the ’70s progsters Necronomicon, the ’80s thrashers Necronomicon, the ’90s deathsters Necronomicon, and now we can add another “original” moniker to the N-con game. Anyway, these Necronomicons represent themselves pretty well on Peccata Mundi, an eight-track onrush of surprisingly inspired ideas that suitably split the differences between the concurrent death- and black-metal scenes (i.e., death metal with more black- influences, black metal with more death- influences). Sure, such are the trends in metal these days, what with all the in-fighting and bickering between the two camps a mere three years ago now a seemingly distant memory, but you can’t really fault this Swedish quartet for that because, after all, it’s still a grand idea to cross-pollinate the two. And Necronomicon does a bang-up job of that on Peccata Mundi, fluidly shifting between and around multiple tempos and moods, lots of haunted-house keyboards awash all over it, vocals straddling the goblin and ogre poles but mostly sticking to the “gogre” middle ground, plenty of slightly bent rhythms and leads here and there, and robustly produced across the board, the album difficult to find fault with yet equally difficult to go gaga over. Oh, well • that’s what you get when you come up with such an uninspired moniker. Like Naglfar with dynamics and more bass, In Aeturnum with keyboards and more bass, Behemoth without a history or much of a discography and just as much bass, Necronomicon nonetheless stand poised for better, more inspired things, but with a name like that, don’t hold your breath too long.
Hammerheart, PO Box 277, 6300 AG Valkenburg, The Netherlands, http://www.hammerheart.com
