KALYUG

Following their debut album, Ninth Moon Black released Kalyug, an instrumental EP including both ambient and post-metal passages. Like most quality post-rock, it's atmospheric, bringing a dark, desolate, and at times almost mournful feeling into the music, all at once spacey, apocalyptic, and futuristic... without the use of keyboards. The songs have a good progression and flow to them, smoothly evolving and shifting from heavy to ambient.

As the album moves along, the songs grow in length, Causatum introducing a main musical theme that seems like it could have been expanded upon, Harbringer a largely ambient piece that reminds of the opening song of A Silver Mt Zion's debut, based on a simple piano line and dominated by samples. The final two tracks are dedicated to showcasing the NMB's post-rock mastery, picking up the pace and depending less on atmosphere and more on the dynamics and natural-sounding ebb and flow the song.

Kalyug is also a concept piece, incorporating slightly distorted spoken word samples into the ambient sections. The speaker talks about the loss of spirituality and the "de-evolution" of mankind, an interesting concept and definitely one that fits with NMB's post-metal, post-apocalyptic sound. Traditionally, a band writes the lyrics themselves and includes them in a more musical way, through singing or screaming or whatnot. NMB has cheated a little by relying solely on samples from someone else, but other clean vocals don't seem like they would fit on this EP, leaving only harsh. I've always found that concept albums with harsh vocals are pointless anyway ? why would you put so much effort onto lyrics if no one can understand what you're saying anyway? In the end, the spoken word is fairly clear and easy to understand, and probably a better option than the others.

NMB has crafted a dark, apocalyptic EP, an atmosphere encouraged by the nature of Kalyug's concept. Each song, especially the last two, flow and shift expertly, firmly rooted in the territory of post-rock and post-metal while also bringing some ambient workings into the equation.

Definitely a quality EP. And the cover art is cool too.