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With a dark name, an album title like this one and such song titles you expect to face an extremely blasphemous band and IN SILENTIO NOCTIS is blasphemous up to a point. The fact is that there is no way I could imagine this band’s heavily brutal music being accompanied only by… ethereal female vocals!

The Finnish quintet began its career in 2006 when Paivinen and Vihma joined forces. After finding the rest of the line up, the band recorded its first and only until now demo CD “Symphonies Of Death”. “Fragments Of Christianity” is the band’s first ever full-length release, containing approximately 51 minutes of haunting Black Metal melodies!

At first I was kind of confused with the “beautiful” and “melodic” vocals, since I may have heard such vocals along with brutal ones in Black Metal bands, but I never came across a BM band that only features a woman using clean vocals. The band’s music is heavily influenced by bands like DIMMU BORGIR and the Swedish Black Metal scene, featuring haunting, yet melancholic melodies and a solid as a rock rhythm section. What will probably seem strange to your ears is the operatic voice of Armi Paivinen that is not bad at all, but sounds “irrelevant” on top of this heavy and extreme music. The fact is that the more I listened to “Through Fragments Of Christianity”, the more I got used to her voice, but I still think that it would sound better with some aggressive vocals next to her. Anyway, the fact is that the Finnish act has released a strong debut with great songwriting and a pretty good sound (thumbs up for the production).

Now it is up to you to decide if this combination of “modern” (if it is the correct term) Black Metal with melodic female vocals is your cup of tea or not.