Then out of the blue, a full decade later, the Danish necromancer called forth the album ‘Endeligt’ in 2017 on Avantgarde Music, after which he then once again vanished from sight. Great was then my surprise when I found that a brand-new record was coming our way in spring of this year.

Countering any sunshine that might pop up over the horizon these days, ‘Dødssang’ is a particularly bleak affair. For those unfamiliar with his brand of graveyard music, one can describe it as an unholy marriage of black metal aesthetics with the most sparse, stripped to bone type of funeral doom. The artist himself described it one time as being very similar, a collection of intros and outros. Each song seems to build up to something, only to then die away, desolate downtrodden and alone.

Unsurprisingly, this does not contribute to making it an easy listening experience. Metalheads, who already have a problem with keeping their attention span on your average funeral doom project, might feel frustrated or even utterly let down, waiting for a catharsis that intentionally never comes.

Judging this music by standard musical criteria is tantamount to a fool’s errand. His discography if anything has a tendency to de-progress compositionally, becoming more and more spartan and barren with each release. One could easily argue that on a casual listen there is nigh any difference between the last two albums or any of the songs even. This is, however, not born out of laziness or some sort of writer’s block, yet is central to the purity and authenticity of Nortt’s singular, artistic vision.

Doing a track by track rundown makes not much sense here either. Individually, they’re not even that long, especially by funeral doom standards.  You get the impression that you’re only allowed a glimpse of a larger whole, as if you picked up the dead echo of a song that has long since passed away, only capturing a hint of what the full song could have one day sounded like, yet now it’s just reduced to a hollow spectre, broadcasting on a lost frequency soon to dissipate as well into nothingness.

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