Daughter of Darkness, Disc I

Hope you have Spotify.  

After releasing about a dozen or so albums in 2008, Natural Snow Buildings took it relatively easy in 2009 and released only three albums.  But the first one out of the gate, Daughter of Darkness, was a box set of five cassette tapes, each ranging from 60 to 90 minutes.  The box set release was limited to 150 copies and the cassettes were numbered from 1-4, with the 5th tape marked with a Ø.  They followed Daughter of Darkness with the release of another cassette tape, Daughter of Darkness V, "tape 5" (but actually the sixth tape) of the box set.

In 2013, Ba Da Bing Records re-released Daughter of Darkness both as a 6-CD set and an 8-disc vinyl album. They combined DoD with DoDV for their release, but they had to re-arrange the sequence of tracks in order to fit the other formats, and one short, two-minute track titled Left For Dead was literally left for dead and dropped from the set altogether.  

IDreamOfNaturalSnow uploaded the entire 6-CD version of DoD and DoDV to YouTube and you can listen to it in all of its 7½ hours of glory there, but let's be real - even during a locked-down global pandemic, ain't nobody got 7½ hours to listen to one album.  And even if you tried taking on the 7½-hour YouTube stream in multiple, shorter listenings, you're going to have to keep track of your stopping times each day, which can get confusing after a while.  

Fortunately, Ba Da Bing put all 6 CDs of their DoD box set onto Spotify, so you can stream the individual discs or even songs at your convenience.  The Snowbringer Cult and Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches are on Spotify, too, along with 2015's Terror's Horns.  If you don't have Spotify, the gadgets above will only play short little 30-second clips of the songs (which range up to nearly a half-hour in length), but if you have Spotify, you can play the entire tracks.  

Hope you have Spotify.  If  you don't and refuse to start now for some reason, you can try and follow along on the YouTube stream.

Rather than take in the whole album at once, we're going to take it disc by disc, starting with CD-1. The track list for the original cassette tape 1 was as follows:

1. Daughter Of Darkness (13:26)
2. Left For Dead (1:56)
3. Satanic Demona Part I (27:57)
4. Satanic Demona Part II (25:37)
5. Curare (6:02)
6. Carnal Flowers (5:47)

However, the CD-1 track list for the Ba Da Bing reissue is as follows:

1. Daughters Of Darkness (14:03)
2. Satanic Demona Part 1 (28:53)
3. Satanic Demona Part 2 (26:24)
4. Curare (6:15)

Carnal Flowers was moved to CD-2 and as mentioned above, Left for Dead was dropped altogether (I have it as an MP3 file and it's just two minutes of a static drone - you're not missing much).  I don't know why the titular track is 37 seconds longer on CD, why the two parts of Satanic Demona are each roughly a minute longer, or where they found 27 more seconds of Curare, but the track lengths are different.  I've listened to both the cassette versions on MP3 and the CD versions on Spotify and can't identify any additional material, although the Spotify/CD version is most certainly "cleaner" and a better recording with more dynamic range.  Another one of NSB's many mysteries, I suppose.

The good news is that on at least this first disc of DoD, NSB are finally past the harsh noise phase of the "Hellscape" trilogy (Between the Real and the Shadow, The Wheel of Sharp Daggers, and Slayer of the King of Hell).  This is much more melodic, less brutally monolithic drone and more similar to their work on Snowbringer Cult than Night Coercion.  The music is more reliant on the actual instruments being played than on overdub effects and tape manipulation, although there are certainly touches of the latter.  

The stand-out tracks are obviously the two parts of Satanic Demona.  The second half of Satanic Demona Part 2 is probably my favorite part of the CD.  For reasons unknown, almost exactly at the 24:00 minute mark (Spotify version), the track suddenly switches to a completely different composition - different melody, different instrumentation, and sounds like a completely different studio or other setting.  It may be a stem of one of the guitar loops buried deep in the mix in the first half of the track, but it's startling to suddenly hear it all alone and by itself.

I understand that this is some people's favorite NSB album,  It does truly mark yet another stage in their evolution. They started basically as a guitar-based, post-rock band with lots of field recordings thrown in the mix.  The Dance of the Moon and the Sun saw them emerge as a folk-drone band, still with the field recordings but experimenting with a variety of other sounds, textures, and approaches to composition. The 2008 recordings saw them lose the field recordings and delve deep into an industrial noise drone.  Daughter of Darkness represents a reconciliation of all their lessons learned. The near-eastern percussion and wordless vocals are still present, but the industrial noise and feedback storms that dominated some of their previous recordings are here used more as another color in their aural palette than the dominant focus of the tracks.  Listen to Curare, the last track on CD-1, to hear what I mean.  It's a maturation and an incorporation of all that they've learned.  

By 2009, NSB were an even more nuanced and versatile band than they were in 2008.