Band:	Nae'blis
Album:	Sketches Of Reality
Style:	Depressive black metal
Release date:	March 2007

01. Distorted Mind
02. The Curse Of Evolution
03. Sketches Of Reality
04. No Purpose In Life

With the current explosion in the availability of (cheap) recording soft and hardware and with today's communication tools, the number of Black Metal bands has also vastly expanded. A few amazing musicians finally had the chance to express their thoughts and translate them to music, but there was also the inevitable wave of boring, redudant and absolutely worthless bands that came with the good ones. One of the genres in which this was most distinctly obvious, is "Suicidal Black Metal".

Since the core of the genre is simple, constantly repeated drumming and likewise guitarwork, it is not difficult to fit into the movement. Yet most bands forget that it is not about the simple musicianship. The relatively easy techniques used actually work, because they have a charming factor, atmosphere, call it the "x-factor" if you will.

The name Nae'blis apparently comes from a book by Robert Jordan (The Wheel Of Time) and is assigned to the Dark One, "he who rules all". Alright, self-conscious musician: check. Four songs all running around twelve minutes, cumulating to a total of around fifty minutes: check. A weird and illegible logo: check. A lonely feel to the artwork, filled with 'solitude': check. Well-balanced and interesting music? Check.

The good thing about "Sketches Of Reality", is its diversity. An awful lot of 'bedroom' Black Metal bands think they can do with three or four riffs that are repeated eternally, but fortunatly, Nae'blis understands this is not enough. So there are a lot of other instruments to be found, mostly the piano and a church organ. They bring new ideas and feelings and allow the hypnotizing riffs in the background to actually be hypnotizing instead of utterly boring.

All in all this album, and this band, stand for fairly original and good music in a genre that contains a couple of pure golden bands, but besides those is a sea of unoriginal, talentless and incompetent bands, which simply do not deserve the air they breathe and the cdr's they fill with their crap. Being so, for the fan of the genre they are worth a listen, but their fanbase will be strictly limited to "suicidal Black Metallers".