Aryan Peste Noire

After six long years, the wait is nearly over: Norway’s Aura Noir will release their sixth full-length album on April 27 via Indie Recordings! Entitled simply Aura Noire — no, the ‘e’ at the end isn’t a typo! — the record offers just the sort of devious, potent, no-bullshit blackened thrash for which the band is known.

This CD's title, Messe Noire, and its dark cover art may mislead some into thinking this album is filled with evil, forbidden things; but the only selection that suggests the diabolical is Alexander Scriabin's macabre Sonata No. 9, "Black Mass," and it comes at the very end, after Igor Stravinsky's light, neo-Classical Serenade in A, Dmitry Shostakovich's sardonic Sonata No. 2, and Sergey Prokofiev's witty but brutal knuckle-buster, the Sonata No. 7, which all have their dark moments, certainly, but not the same sinister mood found in Scriabin. If pianist Aleksei Lubimov's aim in bringing these Russian masterworks together points to some other unifying idea – perhaps the significance of the piano in these composers' thinking – then some other title might have been more helpful. As it is, though, this album seems most unified in Lubimov's vigorous style of playing, brittle execution, and emphasis on the piano's percussive sonorities, evident in each performance. This spiky approach works best in Prokofiev's sonata, and fairly well in Shostakovich's and Stravinsky's pieces; but it seems too sterile in Scriabin's music, which needs more languor and sensuous writhing than clarity or crispness.

Some works seem to echo one another, resounding across eras with a quasi-mystical correspondence that invites us into a strange voyage. Gathering ‘the last Liszt’ and ‘the last Scriabin’ on the same album struck me as obvious. To me, they both have a marvellously indescribable capacity to allow listeners to hear mystery, to create unique soundscapes, to explore ever further and farther, always to innovate and to extend the limits of a certain ending. Both question the conventions of harmonic language with drawn out chromaticism – one that goes almost to excess, inching close to its own demise – and the obfuscation of tonality, as well as Scriabin’s famous invention, the ‘mystic chord,’ which haunts most of his last works. We can therefore lose ourselves in exploration outside all form, skirting all rules, and necessarily giving ourselves over to the almost hypnotic sensation of getting lost in this extreme.

Master Series is the title of a line of greatest hits albums, released in European countries primarily by PolyGram International, as well as A&M Records, Deram Records, FFRR Records, Mercury Records, and Polydor Records. In addition, some albums were reissued by Universal Music Group under the Universal Masters Collection and Millennium Edition titles.

Master Series is the title of a line of greatest hits albums, released in European countries primarily by PolyGram International, as well as A&M Records, Deram Records, FFRR Records, Mercury Records, and Polydor Records. In addition, some albums were reissued by Universal Music Group under the Universal Masters Collection and Millennium Edition titles.

Master Series is the title of a line of greatest hits albums, released in European countries primarily by PolyGram International, as well as A&M Records, Deram Records, FFRR Records, Mercury Records, and Polydor Records. In addition, some albums were reissued by Universal Music Group under the Universal Masters Collection and Millennium Edition titles.