Released: 1994
Can atmosphere hold an album together when nearly every instrument is fighting for the same space? In the Nightside, Eclipse spends its 48-minute run answering that question inside a mix where guitars, keyboards, cymbals, and Ihsahn’s voice often hit at once. Yet the music rarely collapses into random fog. The parts share a design. Melody moves from tremolo-picked guitar to a thin keyboard line, then sinks back into the mass as Faust changes the ground underneath it.
The separate 51-second introduction on the original CD sets out the low keyboard choir before the band enters. “Into the Infinity of Thoughts” then stretches one sequence across more than eight minutes, continually adjusting the view. A rushing guitar figure can be swallowed by sustained keys, emerge again through a cymbal break, and give way to slower chord shapes without losing its identity. The keyboards shape the structure. Their long tones frame the guitar changes, while the rapid riff movement prevents the harmony from turning into soundtrack music.
The production could make all of this unreadable. Pytten and Emperor leave grit on every edge, but the blur is selective. Ihsahn’s rasp sits high and thin, almost level with the cymbals, so the words reach you as flashes instead of a clean narrative. “The Burning Shadows of Silence” doubles that rasp with whispering voices, making a human sound act like another keyboard texture. Tchort’s bass is harder to isolate, though its low body stops the stacked guitar lines from becoming weightless. You hear the band as one body of sound until a single moving part catches your ear.
Faust drives that body forward. His blast beats are fast, but his value is in the changes around them: short rolls that mark a new riff, sudden half-time drops and cymbal accents that make the keyboards sound wider. “Towards the Pantheon” shifts between charging passages and broad, stately sections, so its six minutes never settle into one pulse. On “The Majesty of the Nightsky,” the band cuts from full-speed attack to a middle passage where faint wind, lower vocals, and keyboards become audible. When the guitars surge back, the earlier speed has a different scale.
The main line in “I Am the Black Wizards” is one of the album’s clearest examples. The guitar melody rises through chord changes with almost ceremonial pacing while the drums strike around it. The awkward plural in the title and the archaic syntax fit Ihsahn’s incantatory delivery; he repeats “I am” as a claim laid over music already moving like a procession. “Cosmic Keys to My Creations & Times,” one of two songs with lyrics credited to former bassist Mortiis, uses similar language, but its slower final section leaves more room around the cosmic imagery.
“Inno a Satana” makes the method easier to hear. Its opening riff is direct, keyboards trace large chords above it, and clean voices gradually join Ihsahn’s shriek. The arrangement grows more ceremonial as it goes, ending on the repeated title phrase after the final build. By then, forests, night, and Satanic devotion occupy the same imagined territory. The rough production keeps that scale distant and unreal.
So, can atmosphere hold this crowded album together? Yes. Emperor build it from recurring guitar shapes, keyboard lines that control distance, Faust’s changes in pace, and a voice mixed at the same depth as the instruments. In the Nightside Eclipse stays coherent because those elements describe the same place from different angles. The mix hides plenty of individual notes, but its direction is unmistakable.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the bands and publicists.
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