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Nocternity is a Black Metal band hailing from Greece. Their brand of Black Metal seems heavily influenced by the early 90's scene, pretty raw guitar sound, good alternance between slow to fast-paced stuff (a must to avoid an album getting boring - 42 minutes at high speed would be a major bore). What the band excels at is creating one hell of a haunting listening experience - En Oria pretty much sounds like a journey through hell. The band uses keyboard - don't stop reading just yet - but they KNOW how to use them to maximum efficiency. They are used to create an omnipresent dark atmosphere (no happy keyboarding here!) that is a perfect complement to the other instruments (rather than burying them, like some other bands do..) Just excellent. They're also used in a couple of intros and outros, again with great results. Add to that that the band is about as tight as it can be. This is just another album that won't leave my CD player.

Musically there's nothing I can complain about. The only thing I don't like is that the font used to print the lyrics in the booklet is a little bit hard to read, but that's a very minor detail that doesn't take anything away from the music. The lyrics aren't juvenile either, overall very good, so that's another plus. Instead of the usual Satanic stuff (and derivatives), this deals with the sea - I'll let you discover more by yourself. The vocals are the usual Black Metal style and mixed so they leave the place to the music and the voice seems to be coming from farther away - sometimes with some sort of echoish effect that is used just in the right places. Again, no complaints here! Definitely an album worth picking up for fans of the genre.