After just about a year, NOCTE OBDUCTA are back with this "Notholz", via MDD Records: ideally this should be their comeback to their origins, after having experimented musical freedom in "Mogontiacum", an avant-garde and considerable approach to different genres, which, on the other side of the medal showed some risk of detaching them from their listener with a heterogeneous work like that.

"Totholz (Ein Raunen Aus Dem Klammwald)" is a turning point in this sense, regaining a continuity and stability in terms of genre; NOCTE OBDUCTA lay down their avant-garde black metal through cold atmospheres, summoned through distinct melodies, clean guitar riffs and proper keyboards. Grey, melancholic and bleak landscapes give way to space atmospheres throughout the album, but still it's notable their evocative abilities in both these scenarios.

Distorted guitars welcome listeners with "Innsmouth Hotel", with its catchy groove; "Die Kirche der Wachenden Kinder" with both frost harsh and growl vocals seems to stand with both feet on black metal ground, before taking an ambient excursion and fading into a doom almost spoken section. "Trollgott" with its measured rhythm in the first half seems influenced by folk metal, before lifting up in a more melodic and symphonic second half; title track "Totholz" is remarkable for its pushing and lifting the pedal on the rhythm, before fading into low feedback and some kind of eerie, and at times lysergic, keyboards.

"Ein Staehlernes Lied" is a short but full of interesting hints on their ability to lace together different tempos and rhythms; "Liebster" is an interesting slow one, with slow doom riffs with glacial Torsten vocals to lead the way into the closing of this album. With "Wiedergaenger Blues" NOCTE OBDUCTA reach their experimental peak on this record; the following 15 minutes are a non-linear voyage through different genres: faint piano over white noise; acoustic and bucolic folk sections, backed by spooky choirs, reminding us of AGALLOCH's The White EP; ambient and psychedelic fugues into space; more standard black metal sections. All this has a melancholic fill rouge that keeps this layered microcosmos together.

Totholz represents a good step in NOCTE OBDUCTA discography: this return to their origins is not just a plain coming back to the sound their fans loved but it's an enriched coming home after getting wiser and wider in their view. If we want to list downsides of this record, this is not as particular as the previous one, with some impact on future memorability, and there is a faint touch of mannerism that permeates most of the tracks, however this is still a solid work from a band that knows what it is doing.