If you actually know who this band are, you must be blinking at this choice and wondering if I’ve lost my mind, or that this is a cry for help or something, but no. After a lot of deliberation, I’ve settled on Zoon and I’m ok with my choice. I think. Last year, I saw The Fields playing The Nephilim album start to finish, and I realised that while the album is good, it’s really elevated by the last three songs on the record. So Zoon it is.
My relationship with The Neph is a bit of an odd one. During uni, when I was exploring the Goth thing, I made a bunch of friends that had already been in the scene long before I began to dabble. And for whatever crazy reason, because they were Neph fans before me, this made the band feel like they weren’t mine, they weren’t my discovery. I can be odd like that. I’ve had a friend say that I was always great at recommending music, but would very rarely take recommendations. (I hope I’ve improved on this.)
Zoon however, was my discovery. I think I got a review copy from the student newspaper I worked for. I took it home, stuck it in the CD player and had my mind blown.
The Nephilim are the band Carl McCoy formed after the Fields of the Nephilim broke up in 1991. McCoy got himself a new band and decided to lean into a heavier style of music. Apparently, Zoon was stuck in limbo for years due to record company interference and that’s was really unfortunate for the band. If this was released in ‘94 I think they’re would have been a bigger market for something this heavy, but by 1996, the world had mostly moved on and metal was back on the musical fringes.
Crossing Goth with metal is always going to be something I should love, but it’s rarely done well. Paradise Lost are the obvious kings of the genre but there’s a lot of terrible bands who’ve tried this over the years.
The album opener Still Life, has that Fields-esque slow opening but once the drums start to fade in you can tell something is very different. Two minutes in and the drummer has already started a slow jog on the kicks as the song reveals itself to be atmospheric slow death metal. Initially, it’s a bit of a surprise, but it’s nothing compared to the full assault of Xodus, the second track, which is full of riffs and fury. Here McCoy’s rasping growl effortlessly makes the jump from goth to metal. You can still hear the sound of The Fields on these songs, especially the slower tracks. McCoy’s style has an atmosphere that no other band has come close to, but here it’s combined with death metal
The first time I played the debut single, Penetration to a friend of mine, he refused to believe that the kick drums weren’t a drum machine. I mean, I didn’t think so, but it gives you an idea how hard this is going. This song has been covered by Behemoth and is a big favourite of Nergal’s, who has sung it live with the Fields several times.
What makes this album stand out from all the other goth metal albums out there is that the band understands that it’s the atmosphere that is essential. This is an album that balances this death metal side with the goth drama. The dry ice and cowboy outfits work as well here as they did with the Fields, for every blastbeat, there’s a passage with delayed guitars and moody synths and they never step on each other.
I think the reason I love this album more than the Field’s material is that it doesn’t have the Pink Floyd worship that puts me off Elizium and the band’s proggier tendencies. That and the fact I love a band that puts the bass right up front, combined with a drummer who thinks that the idling speed of their kick drums should be “light jog”, makes this album catnip to me.
For me, this is the best Field of the Nephilim album and the best goth metal record that doesn’t have Paradise Lost written on the album cover. And while that may sound like faint praise, I assure it is anything but. However, any chat about that is for a later post.
https://lynkify.in/song/zoon-pt-3-wake-world/NLV6lYiQ
The ways of exile 