Review: “Away From Black Days” EP by Nonsense

“Away From Black Days” is the sophomore EP from Lyon France based Progressive meets DJent 5 piece Nonsense. A crowd funded affair that appeared in March, it follows their 2017 debut “On Earth” and sees the band joined by Joe Tal, formerly of Textures for “Redeeming Light”. The quintet comprise a rhythm section of Maxime Mangeant on drums and Romain Regal on bass, vocalist Oliver Sicaud and Guitarist duo Sebastian Biola and Raphael Dear Stefano.

The introduction to the EP comes in the form of the 143 second “Coma”, a building atmospheric progressive lead riff that builds into a face melting solo overlapped by a chunky DJent riff and clean vocal verse of fragility. Blown out of the water almost instantly by the opening salvo of “The Urge” that has an undercurrent of post-hardcore influences as it launches head long into some ferocious unclean vocals and some high energy rapid fire Tech-Metal guitar work that shows some astonishing skill. Backing down for a pair of clean verses with an almost choral reverence before stepping back into those solid polyrhythms, it’s a joy of a tune. Again, the solo on this cut is delivered with breathtaking pace and accuracy.

“Black Days” takes a more progressive approach while still having that satisfying DJent element overlaying the some of the more epic and melodic parts with crunch. The vocals sound like they’re going to crack in a couple of places during the elongated growls but don’t manage it and the switch between unclean and clean vocals is seamlessly transitioned. The pummellingly good kit deserves a mention, the timings are metronomically accurate as they have to be with the more technical music and they’re carried off with perfection. At 7 minutes and 32 seconds “Innate” is the longest cut and has some really interesting stuccato riffage that draws you in from the very start. The pacing is kept high tempo for the vast majority of the material on show with this EP and this cut is no different. The musicanship on show is frankly stunning and when you think you’ve heard something amazing, they manage to pull something else out of the bag. The track is actually split into two parts as around the 4 and a half minute mark, a moments silence is replaced with an epic and icy synth that has a gloriously ambient quality.

As we mentioned at the start of the review “Redeeming Light” sees the band joined by Joe Tal, formerly of Textures. Having had the lemon sorbet, things are picked up where they left off and delivered with stylish flourish of epic lead guitar work that wouldn’t be out of place on a Periphery album. It’s a fantastic way to end a really great EP. Stand up and take note, Nonsense should be signed up and dropping albums of epic proportions very, very soon [7.5/10]

“Away From Black Days” by Nonsense is out now and available via iTunes