Nightwolf

Nightwolf & Ravenclaw - Conspiracy Against Christianity
Obscure Arts Productions, 1996
Genre: Black Metal

Nightwolf:
1. Intro
2. Twilight of the Night (Dusk)
3. Kingdom of Hate
4. Night without Return
5. The Shadows of the Ancient Fog are Rising
6. Dawn
7. Outro
8. Conspiracy Against Christianity (Split-song)
Ravenclaw:
9. Destroyer
10. On the Throne of Fire
11. The Prophecy Comes True
12. Necromancy
13. White Pigeons Fly Nevermore
14. I Hail the Night
16. An Everlasting Fire Burns Our Souls

Side Ravenclaw: here

Side Nightwolf:

This is the only recorded material from the Nightwolf project. It's a solo project of Celticmoon, who has recently died in 2014. So, it's kind of surreal that I finally got this release in that same year and now am doing a review for it. It looks like he has been involved with a few projects over his time involved with music, but this is the first I have ever heard. I, naturally, picked this up seeking out the Ravenclaw material, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear how good the Nightwolf material is. This comes as a cassette release with a multi-panel, but single sided booklet and is limited to 200 hand-numbered copies of which I own #138.

As you'd expect from someone doing a split with Ravenclaw, Nightwolf's music is pretty raw, but it's also extremely good. You can clearly hear some serious Moonblood influence in the way the songs are written, and maybe that's why I really find it enjoyable to some degree. The good part is that its not really a rip-off in any way, instead its sort of its own thing. The guitar riffs manage to have a fairly epic quality to them at times, which can give the music this sort of soaring feel to it. Other times things are just fast and grim like "The Shadows of the Ancient Fog are Rising". The final song on the Nightwolf side, and title track of the split is a joint creation between Celticmoon and Gaamalzagoth. The song definitely blends their two styles together, with Gaamalzagoth lending his vocal performance to the majority of verses, as far as I can tell. It definitely makes for a true old school sounding song in that regard.

It's a real shame that this is the only thing Nightwolf ever did. It would have been interesting to see Celticmoon build the project more over the years, but that will never happen now. It's certainly some quality material written at a very early time when this would sound relatively fresh during some of its moments, so for that it is a quite commendable release. It's too bad this release is stuck in the relative unknown, as I have never heard the band named uttered in conversations.