★★★★★
"A mix of hard rock, industrial, and some avant-garde metal focused around the sax is what you get here..." The Norwegian genre-benders from Shining made quite a spectacle promoting this particular album, flying gear by helicopter to play on the top of a mountain. Following up the genre defining "Blackjazz" and subsequent "One One One" release, Shining has a serious shift in tone primarily towards industrial this time around, with much of the "International Blackjazz Society" album exuding a...
- www.metalunderground.com
2015-12-22
★★★★★
On their 2010 album Blackjazz, the Norwegian jazz/prog collective Shining absorbed metal into their aesthetic, and it seemed to focus them. On earlier records the band, organized around multi-instrumentalist Jørgen Munkeby, were more elusive, but Blackjazz was an album made entirely of jagged shapes, like the irregular, violent architecture of a cliffside. It feels aggressively assembled, as if its ideas of metal and jazz were less harmonized than magnetized together...
- pitchfork.com
2015-10-22
★★★★★
"Going way past what's expected of a 'black metal' band, Niklas Kvarforth and the rest of the Shining crew has a musical masterpiece on its hands with 'IX' that's simultaneously brooding, thoughtful, and compelling." There's an awful lot of ways to express darkness through music, and it doesn't always have to involve words like "black" or "depressive...
- www.metalunderground.com
2015-05-16
★★★★★
Anyone with so much as a passing interest in depressive black metal will know who and what the Swedish Shining is. More to the point, they'll probably know that Niklas Kvarforth is something of an isolated, complex individual-or at least, that's what one thinks when they listen to anything from Shining's fairly exploratory discography...
- www.sputnikmusic.com
2015-04-20
★★★★★
If you've listened much at all to Norway's Shining, you've likely learned not to be surprised by their ceaseless surprises. For more than a decade, the band has often functioned as a pinball ricocheting between musical enthusiasms with delightful unpredictability. Initially a jazz band, they've since shot between psychedelic and progressive rock, spasmodic noise and iron-fisted metal, ostensibly directed by little more than mercury and whimsy...
- pitchfork.com
2013-06-03
★★★★★
With 2010's career-defining Blackjazz, Norwegian band Shining (not to be confused with the Swedish depressive black metal outfit of the same name) held back from polishing the roughness that was always present around its sonic edges. Despite moving away from its origins as an acoustic jazz ensemble and into the realm of extreme metal over the latter part of the '00s, even when it went all-out crazy, there was a surprising restraint on the part of the musicians...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-05-24
★★★★★
In early 2010, progressive Norwegian quintet, Shining, released Blackjazz. Though it's likely to be regarded later as a monumental niche or cult release, Blackjazz holds true a level or mastery consistent with the better-known classics of this ilk, namely Fragile by Yes, The Inner Mounting Flame by Mahavishnu Orchestra or (appropriately as they provide Shining their only cover song) In The Court Of The Crimson King by King Crimson...
- www.noripcord.com
2012-02-09
★★★★★
With Blackjazz (Indie Recordings, 2009), the transformation of Norway's Shining from metal-tinged jazz fusion into something, well, other was complete...
- www.allaboutjazz.com
2011-12-29
★★★★★
Niklas "Kvarforth" Olsson might be a miserable sod (after all, his last album featured a cover photo of a man with a gun in his mouth), but for all the doom and gloom that hangs over Shining, they've turned into one of the more adventurous bands to come out of the Swedish black metal scene. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to call these guys black metal at all these days...
- www.popmatters.com
2011-01-20
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