Nostra Morte - Sin Retorno
CD Info
2012
Skarlet Records
11 Tracks
English, Latin & some French Lyrics
Well, the first thing to get straight here is that this IS NOT an Italian band, even if the band name is Italian. It means Our Death, of course, and I guess they figured using an Italian name gave it a more Gothic sound. The title means "No Return" not "Without Return" which was the way I interpreted it. And, the lyrics are in Spanish, a Mexican version of the language so I have a little trouble with them, my Spanish being more Valenciano. But the music, well, there’s no misunderstanding there. This is first rate, killer Symphonic, Operatic Gothic. There’s a single featured female vocal on most tracks, and a number of male vocals, all of them first rate. There’s also an interesting female guest vocal, we’ll address that directly. You get choral sounds, a significant metal, all the Gothic you need, all the symphonic you deserve. A band like this would draw rave responses at MFVF, they can stand with anything I saw on the menu this year, course, I wasn’t there but I’m familiar with most of those bands and Nostra Morte takes a back seat to none of them. . . just a suggestion to the powers that be.
Now maybe you’re wondering how a sound like this evolves in Mexico. Well, you may have noticed that a fair number of European bands fly right over the Red, White and Blue and head to Mexico to perform. They get a better reception I guess. But this sound does mirror the absolute best coming from Western Europe. On occasion, they do provide music that incorporates a Mexican, or should I say Latin American interpretation to things. This is especially apparent on tracks like Cuando la Muerte se Viste de Gloria, which is actually addressed as a "Mariachi" sound. It’s one of my favorites on the CD, I mean, dude, I loved that movie Desperado with Antonio Banderas and Salma (Huba Huba) Hayek and this song would have fit right into that soundtrack. The vocal here is recorded by guest vocalist Lucano Herrera, a Mexican rock vocalist. However, the majority of the sounds are far more classically oriented. Erik el Rojo clearly meets this definition. With this one, you get the entire act, and then some. You get the principle female vocalist, Madam Dollette LaMort, you get the symphonics, you get choral elements and you get something you just don’t always find in this style of music, a first rate MALE opera vocal, in this case, one Pablo Akuma Atahualpa, baritono en compañia opera INBA en Bellas Artes DF. And the combination of all these solid vocal sounds lends this track a feeling that is hard to describe.
Couple things you may have noticed that might need clarification. First, there are the graphics from the CD which are a bit campy and could possibly give you the wrong idea about where this music is going. Yea, I know, Our Death sounds pretty sinister. And pictures of vampires hitting the necks of pretty young things certainly reinforces this perspective. But, in my opinion, this does little to illustrate the music, or the lyrical ideas that are addressed in the music. I had some communication with drummer Arcan DiMort, right, they’re all " something Mort" , it’s a stage name thing. Anyway, he quickly shot down my thinking relative to the lyrical message: "Our first album was very explicit about the death topic. Now we are left it implied between the lyrics and try to talk about freedom, about power, courage, will power, rebelliousness." Those lyrics can still take on a dark feeling, it’s just not the kind of thing you associate with guys with sharp teeth who tend to hang out in the evening and transform into bats when they feel the need to. You’ll get a better feel for those lyrics as we discuss individual tracks.
Sin Reterno begins with an interesting twist. The song is the title track, Sin Retorno but there are actually two tracks, the first one being a live intro to the song. You get the crowd noise and a bit of what this one might sound like at MFVF, before they transfer to the actual studio production. And with that studio production, we move into the lyrics which paint an interesting picture that flows over that killer instrumental work. A translation of the Spanish to English looks like this:
Immortal soul / Cover myself
Clean all my evil / Take of the good inside me
Immortal soul / Give me the strength
To continue / On my feet
Follow this way / Don’t look behind
When you cross the portal / You can´t go back
This is the path / We’re evil and good
Hide out to love them / Far away from reality
Nice ideas, but far more lovely sounding in the original Spanish.
There are some other original approaches. Pasion Nocturna is a pure classical production. It sounds like a classical string quartet thing, like what you get after the funeral. Others focus on the male / female vocal interaction, generally more classical than metal oriented although there are strong guitar and drum components on most tracks. Persefone is one of these and uses a more typical male rock vocal. However, there are multiple male vocals performing with the band: Eiven DuMort doing the clean vocals, Alferis DaMort and Pierl LeMort doing growls. El Amo del Reflejo is representative of the growling vocal, again positioned against a strong female vocal and augmented by choral sounds produced electronically. The lyrics, again, sound far superior in this original Spanish.
Cuando duermes por las noches / Puedo verte recostar a mis pies,
Soy quien vigila tus sueños / Desde el otro lado
OK, there’s one more title I have to address. It’s called Nova and there are two individual tracks. The first one is done with Madam Dollette LaMort, the main vocalist. Beautiful. First class metal material, done in Spanish by a vocalist who performs at the top of the category. However, the second version may be of even more interest, especially to those who speak English. That version is done by Gaby Koss. I’d do the lyrics here but you get them in the video. These two tracks are certainly worth the price of admission, even without any of the other seriously strong music.
One of the interesting things about much of this music is the drumming, which is the domain of my man Arcan DiMort. Most of us are familiar, to some extent, with how keyboards and electronics are used to produce a significant part of this type of music. However, DiMort really blew me away with his description of how that part of the business works in his world: "We use a pearl drum but triggered with drum triggers so we can convert the impulse of the notes in midi and then we use superior drummer. It's really expensive to record an acoustic drum and to reach the sound quality of the superior drummer but then we equalize that superior drums sound in our way. So! i guess that the drums that we use in the superior drums are gms. The snare drum is a gretsch or maybe the ludwig black beauty i don't know exactly." Well, we can exactly say that playing the drums has become a bit more technical than what it was in the days of the somewhat less technical Ringo Starr.
Sin Retorno pretty much delivers on all the requisite components in the Symphonic, Operatic Gothic musical genre. Nostra Morte is up there with the big names, and provides a sound pretty much anyone who visits this site will be comfortable with. Understanding the Spanish may be a minor inconvenience to some, while attracting others. . . like me. But the music? As good as it gets, both the work of the central caste and the rather significant guest artists. So don’t worry about the vampires, they’re only there for the visual effect. Go to the music, it’ll work for you like Dracula in a YWCA.
10 / 10
