Imagine an amalgation of Chelsea Wolfe at her most haunting and the ethereal, tribal quality of Dead Can Dance and you’ll have a fairly good notion what effect listening to Noêta will have on you.
I deliberately state effect here as ‘Beyond Life and Death’ needs to considered as an experience, an initiation of sorts into the darkest recesses of the artists’ own minds rather than just a set of songs. On par with likeminded label mates Darkher the Swedish duo uses a sparse, yet focused instrumentation to maximum effect in order to intensify Êlea’s plaintive vocals that recall both PJ Harvey and Anneke Van Giersbergen. Like pictures of a lunar landscape ‘Beyond Life and Death’ invokes both images of mesmerizing beauty as a humbling and unsettling feeling of insignificance and desolateness.
Tracklist
- Beyond Life
- In Drowning
- Darkest Desires
- Pneuma
- In Void
- Dead Soil
- Beyond Death
- In Thunder
- Urkaos
Label: Prophecy Productions
9/10
