Nedogled – Spiritwood
Nedogled – Spiritwood
Self-Released
Release Date: 01/12/23
Running Time: 41:35
Review by Dark Juan
8/10
Good afternoon, dear friends, fiends, and oddbods. May today find you replete and resplendent with happiness and all good things. Dark Juan is feeling fairly positive today, which is a rare and precious thing considering that normally I am misanthropic to the point of being the subject of a Black Metal song. I have successful escaped my wrangling of recalcitrant young people and have escaped back to the warm embrace of Crow Cottage, the Smellhounds and Mrs Dark Juan, who actually is a very nice person despite the amount of piss-taking Dark Juan does of her on the many pages you fine people have read which have emanated from my diseased imagination.
Now, Dark Juan doesn’t write for Ever Metal for plaudits, or praise, or to be a terrible ligger. Although I am. Dark Juan does this because there is a vast and untapped wealth of hugely talented musicians hovering just below the eyeline of people who only see the likes of Slipknot and Five Finger Death Punch and Avenged Sevenfold – you know, the hugely famous, polished, shiny top of the pile. Arguably the more interesting music is in the underground, where niche bands get to showcase their brilliance and talent, talent that could kick the fuck out of the bands that have made it but will cruelly be ignored and forgotten unless you have the volunteers, the Army of the Faithful, the people who CARE enough about the worlds of Extreme music to give up their time to bring these artists to the attention of a wider audience. This is why Dark Juan writes, and this is why everyone on the team writes, and why Ever Metal Mum Beth “Tidy Your Fucking Bedroom If I’m Your Mum, But, It’s A Disgrace” Morait maintains the website at her own expense, both fiscal and time, and Editor-In-Extremis Simon “EDSIMON” Black gives freely of his own time to basically re-write my blatherings.
One of the biggest thrills for me as a writer, though, is when you have artists ask SPECIFICALLY for you to listen to their music. That’s when you know what you do has value, and this is what has happened with Nedogled – A Serbian artist who creates music in a solar-powered studio in the deep woods of Serbia. To think that my work has reached across Europe to the Balkans and made a connection with someone is a very humbling thought indeed. The Platter Of Splatter™ has been activated, and it is currently fizzing with unusual enthusiasm as it plays “Spiritwood”, the debut long player from Nedogled. Let us go down the darkened path into the great, vast forest and see what fantastic creatures we can discover…
‘Kamen/Stone’ (the slash is mine, as I have translated the titles into English) opens the record and it is a gentle opening indeed, being pastoral and soothing, all flanged guitar, but with a certain underlying menace, which is constantly building beneath the softness. I guess it’s like the moss that covers an undisturbed rock in a forest. The track hints at the teeming life in a forest, from the tiniest insect and up through the food chain to the apex predator. It also has (as it wanders from pastoral calm to schizophrenic geological disturbance) a sense of the immobility of the rock, the all-seeing, everlasting bones of the world. There is a crystalline section as well, hinting at the minerals that the rock may contain. The whole piece is analogous to the rock being a living thing and the focal point around which everything else revolves.
The music of the whole album seems to Dark Juan to be deeply personal to Nedogled, extremely esoteric and incredibly idiosyncratic. ‘Gljive/Mushrooms’ encompasses everything from the Psychedelic stylings of Hawkwind’s ex-electronics expert Dikmik through to punky, Gothic guitar work which is shot through with Dungeon Synth, Doom and Outrun and Vaporwave variants of Synthwave. There are parts where just this one track references New Romanticism. You wouldn’t (as I didn’t) think that this amount of eclecticism could be combined into a cohesive whole, but somehow Nedogled manages to weave it all together into something utterly unique. ‘Krzno/Fur’ nods a knowing head towards the sheer tunnel-vision outlandishness of The Prize Fighter, Inferno and grafts it to the kind of Electronic Pop sound of the likes of the Eurythmics but with a subtle touch of the bass sound of Melissa Auf Der Maur just to further confound the Yorkshire yokel who’s trying to make some sense of what he is listening to.
There’s a pleasing, natural rawness to the music as it is performed on the album, and this is because Nedogled used a full-on analogue, hardware-only approach to the recording and only fired up his computer for the mixing work. This really shows in the music as it is played, where there is not the same seamlessness that other Synth artists like, say, Gunship or Mega Drive display. This music, although primarily Electronic, is the aural equivalent of muddy boots and moonlight dappling the face of a traveler as they make their way through a dark, foreboding wood where there are unidentified sounds coming from the undergrowth as they tread the forest path with a measured pace, not afraid, but very watchful of the woods around them. In fact, Dark Juan thinks the closest comparison to the music of Nedogled is possibly the very early recordings of Mortiis, long before he joined Emperor on bass, when he was making dank, damp, dark Electronic music that was utterly impossible to categorise. Nedogled has done something broadly similar – he has managed to harness the coldness and isolation of the music of Joy Division, the weight and power of Doom Metal, the sheer eclecticism of Synthwave, the raw power of Punk (in the sound of the guitar and bass), the emotion of Goth Rock, the madness of The Prize Fighter, Inferno, the same disregard for conformality as Throbbing Gristle and the drug-fuelled Psychedelia of Hawkwind.
In short, Nedogled has given the world of nature a voice in musical form and this album represents an exploration of nature in all its forms, from the cradle of life to it being savage and red in tooth and claw – ‘Mesec/Moon’ just screams to Dark Juan’s imagination of lycanthropic transformation, loping after a target and the savagery of the kill and feeding until the beast is sated and then it resting and calming after the bloodlust has passed.
To try to make sense of this artist and his music – Nedogled is Jean-Michel Jarre for the modern, more extreme age. It’s as if that French keyboard botherer liked heavy guitars and didn’t fucking use the likes of Hank Marvin as a guest musician, and there is a fascinating narrative quality to the work of Nedogled. This album has stimulated Dark Juan’s imagination (which is never normally a good thing as it usually strays down the path of humans being processed through rusting, blood-splattered meat-packing plants, the stink of their fear and terror palpable as they move ever closer to where they have seen and heard the thud of the captive bolt pistol punching holes in the foreheads of those who have gone before…) where the rocks and the trees and the animals of the forest are able to converse (with discernible syllabification) with Dark Juan, and the music of Nedogled is what it sounds like to outsiders, even though I can understand every fucking word.
It’s very, very good indeed.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Патентирани систем оцењивања прскања крви Дарк Јуан. Здраво, сви моји нови српски пријатељи! Зар не волите само Гоогле преводилац?) awards Nedogled 8/10. The usual mark has been deducted because this is not a Metal record, and Dark Juan is of the opinion that only the most out there of musical explorers will listen to this album which is a crying shame because it is an atmospheric piece of work that has a soul all of its own.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Kamen/Stone
02. Gljive/Mushrooms
03. Krzno/Fur
04. Krug/Circle
05. Frula/Flute
06. Mesec/Moon
07. Pakao/Hell
08. Sekira/Axe
09. Koren/Root
10. Tajna/Secret
LINE-UP:
Nedogled – Solar-powered everything!
LINKS:
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