Nocturne hail from Chicago, Illinois, U.S. of A., and it is a solo-project by Dan Klein, who did record everything, instruments and vocals. The debut is called Ave Noctem and lasts for forty five minutes.
Ave Noctem stands for an extremely overpowering, colossal form of technical and melodic Black Metal with a Death Metal edge. The approach is timeless (i.e. not modern nor old styled, and all of them in one as well) and universal (i.e. American but border-crossing too). The sound is massive, partly because of the rough, brute production, partly caused by the unstoppable and pounding rhythms. The latter (the rhythmic part) sort of cover the whole in a post-sludgy veil, with a track like opener Pursuance Of The Righteous Elucidation as ultimate example. Some tracks, like The Prodigious Plight, are rather to be considered a mixture of the darkest spheres of USDM with the most epic Nordic-styled Scandinavian Black Metal acts (the main riffs on aforementioned song, by the way, are heavily inspired by a band like Desaster as well). Some parts are pretty slow, and therefor even more epic and warlike (again the Scandinavian scene comes to mind, with Bathory, Kampfar, Forgotten Woods, Hades Almighty etc. as references) (even a sporadic harmony chants colours the whole), and some excerpts bring the darkest elements of the most obscure part of the North-American Death Metal scene in the picture.
One remark, but it has nothing to do with Nocturne’s effort, yet with the comments provided by the promotion responsible crew. What the f*ck do you mean with ‘progressive’ to define this project’s music? Dear reader, don’t be misled by the ‘prog’-terminology, because that corresponds to faeces by a male bovine (bull shit indeed).