Nothnegal is a metal band hailing from Maldives… and was formed in 2006 by the cousins Fufu - vocals/guitars and Hilarl – guitars. The band was playing melodic death/black metal at that time and self-released the “Antidote of Realism” E.P. in 2009. Apparently, sometime later, the American drummer Kevin Talley (Six Feet Under, Daath, ex-Chimaira, ex-Dying Fetus, ex-Misery Index) and the Finnish keyboardist Marco Sneck (Kalmah, Poisonblack) joined Nothnegal as full time members.

 

Nothnegal have changed their music style in “Decadence” (without losing their death metal roots); compared with the E.P… and as they claim on their official FB site: the band melts together thrash, industrial and progressive metal with the ambient of Maldivian atmosphere and culture. That’s not absolutely invalid, for they did add some industrial, atmospheric and ambient elements on their music (no prog features though)… the songs, generally, have some nice orchestrations… and it is obvious that this band’s trying to explore new places in their musical creativity. They do not do it very successfully though… but they do have some nice ideas. The vocals are a little bit annoying after a while (I do not like the voice distortion they use that much and the attempt to sound ala Schuldiner)… and the guitar solos are sort of lame. The last three songs (“R.A.D.A.R.”, Sins Of Our Creations” & “Singularity”) have clean vocals… that are quite average in my opinion. Maybe the best song is “Salvation” that also opens the album. The production is OK, not as heavy as it should be for this kind of music, although the drums sometimes sound like a drum machine.

 

This is just a debut… they’ve got a long way to go… and they seem they wanna experiment and that’s good for a band. However, they need to get rid of some features which sometimes, give you the impression that you are listening to a sloppy average metal band… if they wanna better things up.