Nocturnal Winds - Demo II 1998

Nocturnal Winds - Demo II 1998
1) Son of the Winterstorm
2) Instrumental
3) Warrior of Light
4) My Angel

Mega / Zippyshare

Ask and ye shall receive, here is the second Nocturnal Winds demo posted unusually fast. Like the previous one, brother Grev dubbed, I ripped and uploaded. Thanks as always! For this one we did not have a cover though so image borrowed from Metal Archives. It's... colourful.

Four songs again, for slightly longer playtime and the second one, titled "Instrumental" (guess what kind of a song it is) is easily the longest of the bunch at almost ten minutes. Perhaps that could be taken as an indicator of the lads' confidence in their skills. I suppose the playing is somewhat tighter and music perhaps a little more ambitious and uh, complex? Not Yngwie Malmsteen stuff but there's a certain amount of increase in the instrument intercourse here. Some thrashing riffs, power metallic bits and all sorts of knick-knacks have been added. Also the lyrical topics seem to have shifted away from what was almost like weather report black metal stuff to uh, whatever they are about, at least the titles indicate a change for worse; ok the first one seems to more or less carry on from where they left off, but "Warrior of Light" causes slight shiver run down my spine in its powermetallishness (stop making up words!) and gives me an involuntary Tolkki flashback while "My Angel" brings at first mind old Arcturus (yay) and then, overriding the positive association, terrible, syrupy power ballad or perhaps gothic metal abomination of some (possibly German) kind. And that's just the song titles, what horrors the actual songs contain!? Well, they're not nearly as bad as the mental images my tormented subconsciousness seems fond off conjuring. WoL is a pretty lively tune and more straightforward than expected while MA is more power metally and radio-friendly, somewhat forgettable melotune rather than a performance of poor man's avantgarde or the diabeteous, gothic simulacrum I secretly hoped it to be. Surprisingly enough the very end of the track gets suddenly much better, but that's just not enough for such a long track.

I'm sure many people will welcome the musical development, progress and slight changes here while some will end up enjoying the first demo better. Note that all but the instrumental appear again on their debut album, as well as "Frost Divine" from the demo I which would've been only my third pick from there. Recommended (obviously) for the fans of the band, of Finnish melodic death metal and long instrumental songs.