The Black Dahlia Murder - Nocturnal

Everyone knows that there are some albums that you end up listening to so much that you pretty much memorize each song. You know every word, every guitar lick, you can play air drums and air guitar perfectly along with the whole album. One of those albums for me is Nocturnal by The Black Dahlia Murder. I got this album about a couple months after its release (and soon after ended up buying the CD). Nocturnal is the best example of The Black Dahlia Murder at their absolute best. Although this album didn’t get major attention from the media until almost a year after its release, this was the band’s ultimate breakthrough album that has since caused them to headline almost every tour they’ve been on such as the 2008 and 2011 Summer Slaughter Tour, and landing a place in the legendary 2012 Wacken Open Air Festival in Germany.

Miasma was the record that they used to lock in their own unique sound. After a band does that, their next job for the next album is to take that sound to another level with better songwriting and a more solid state of mind as a band. The Black Dahlia Murder proved themselves worthy of accomplishing this in 2007. The musical style didn’t make any drastic changes with this album compared to Miasma. Although the amount of technicality skyrocketed, and the complexness of the guitar, bass, and drum parts also went up to the point to where I have a really hard time playing this album on the bass.

When you first play the album, the first few seconds are complete silence with a little bit of white noise that tricks you into turning up the volume only to come on with a blast of elongated guitar chords and complex drumming to blow you away to the point to where you forget to turn the volume back down. This is the kind of music that automatically sucks you in. Another thing that the drummer does in this album that he’s never done before is doing his own signature blast beat. The first song has a really good example of his blast beat drumming and it sounds amazing.

The next thing that I want to talk about is that the lyrical themes start to go in a different direction. Miasma and Unhallowed primarily tell stories of murder and serial killers. Nocturnal’s lyrics revolve more around horror themes with some fantasy mixed in here and there. The primarily horror-themed lyrics only stick around for this album, starting to go into a more abstract, almost sci-fi direction in Deflorate.

The guitar distortion in this album has quite a bit of similarity as that of Miasma, and even more so with Deflorate. There is quite a bit of treble, but that can be made up for if you have a lot of bass. Other than that, the sound production is mind-blowing. The most famous and recognizable song off this album is “What a Horrible Night to have a Curse”. There are also numerous classics like “Nocturnal”, “Deathmask Divine”, and “Virally Yours”. But I would say my favorites off the album would be “Everything Went Black”, “Nocturnal”, and “Deathmask Divine”. This album is a classic that everyone needs to hear. I would give this a perfect score so LOOK THIS UP!!