Feminazgul – No Dawn For Men (2020)

August 1, 2022

I feel dirty because a few of the black metal related things I’ve touched recently have leaned more towards the unsavoury (both Clandestine Blaze and Deathspell Omega which I’ve covered contain the unsavoury Mikko Aspa), so it was almost with a sigh of relief that I remembered I had a Feminazgul record to check out. I can’t decide if the name is pure genius or just downright awful, but either way, it certainly turns heads and grabs attention; mixing fantasy and reality together into a melting pot that if anything, sums up RABM quite nicely.

I love how RABM has risen as a reaction to the shittier end of the black metal stick, namely NSBM or those who flirt with such, and I can’t help but feel proud of my fellow lefty brethren for their fire and moxy in spawning a whole genre in reaction and disgust to the status quo. As readers may have noticed, I do cover some unsavory acts here on LIW, from black metal to porno grind, but for every post about a record of moral dubiousness (lol), you’ll find five Agathocles posts to balance it out. No, seriously though, personally I stand firmly on the left, but I also disagree massively with cancel culture or censorship, in any way shape or form. If you censor something, you make it taboo. And by doing that, there’s a certain subset of people who are immediately drawn to that. Censorship is not the answer. Pretending entire scenes or genres of music do not exist, is not the answer, and it’s certainly not something so heavy that I expected to get into here on my blog so I’ll wrap this up quickly and get back to the review of No Dawn For Men.

Regardless of your politics, this is some absolutely stunning black metal. In fact, it is some of the best black metal I have ever heard. It has an intense, repetitive progressive edge – almost something that dare I say is altogether more Swans than anything like, say, Deafheaven. The songs fall into these ruts, like a record falling into a locked groove, and the keyboards, guitars and everything else just ends up falling over itself and back on itself, like waves in the ocean or folding steel into a sword in metallurgy. Honestly, this is truly beautiful, and I need to get myself a cassette of this thing ASAP because damn, absolutely 10/10 to Feminazgul.

I hope they do another record soon.