The presence of a name rather well known as that of Tim Call in Nightfell should exert a certain appeal to fans of extreme doom, but it must be said that in pair with Todd Burdette (known especially for his militancy in the crust sludge band Tragedy), the drummer already in the remarkable Aldebaran and today in the seminal Mournful Congregation offers a sound much more changing than the funeral doom played at those junctures. On the other hand, Nightfell exists since 2012 and Never Comes the Storm is already the fourth full length, even if the one that actually attracted the spotlight on the duo from Portland was the previous A Sanity Deranged, where the lethal mixture of black, death and doom found its ideal fulfillment. The new album confirms and reinforces the good things produced in the recent past: Burdette and Call re-propose their sound restless, sometimes threatening, without winks and able to switch from solemn orchestrations to rough and intense forms of extreme metal, at times brought back to the painful moods of funeral. The brevity of the work favors an assimilation otherwise not so obvious, with the three main songs (Emptiness of Belief, Never Comes the Storm and End of the Rope) that best synthesize the meeting between the different backgrounds of the two musicians, making it then result in solutions never obvious (worth for all the beautiful acoustic break in the middle of Emptiness of Belief). Underestimating Nightfell would really be a pity but, unfortunately, the risk exists, because the fruits of their inspiration have matured in a definitive way just in a moment in which it's easy to lose works of great value in this "mare magnum" of releases. 2022 - Parasitic Records
