I never got deeply into Bal-Sagoth, so it makes sense that a Bal-Sagoth clone would capture my attention even less than the original.  ‘The End Of The Dark Ages’ is the sound of a band desperately striving to be epic but having no idea of how to do that aside from through the empty mimicry of other epic bands.  It’s vacuous music to the point where I seriously can’t remember anything about it even after a dozen listens.  It’s that boring.  Dagorlad doesn’t even really sound like Bal-Sagoth, they just sound like a weird attempt at sounding exactly like that band.  It’s like when you were a little kid and your cheapass parents bought you bootleg toys from Mexico, so you had to get dressed up in your Spaderman pajamas with a black scorpion in the center.  The experience of listening to this album is equally unsatisfying.

This shit’s really stale.  Plodding mid-paced blackish/symphonic metal with dramatic narration in what seems like every second of the album.  The production is very flat and lifeless to the point where it doesn’t even seem like music half the time, just instruments shuffling around in a sort of melodic fashion.  There’s no aggression or intensity, but it doesn’t feel restrained, it just feels… tired, like the band recorded the whole thing after two and a half days with no sleep.  They’re phoning everything in.  There’s a lot of keys and synthestra that attempt to sound epic but really just sound like the soundtrack to a pulp fantasy novel, and not in a good way, just a generic way.  Riffs are three-chord tremolo or chug affairs that meander under the keyboards like aardvarks just sort of trundling around without incident.

I don’t get the point of this, it sounds like the band just wants to say “FUCK IT, I’M DONE WITH THIS” all throughout the record but plod on without any enthusiasm.  It’s not like the songwriting is even good; I think like 70% of the album is totally devoid of drums (or drum machine, rather, which makes no attempt to sound lifelike), just guitar/keyboards/bad narration.  It’s an attempt at narrative songwriting that just cocks itself up over and over again.  Who’s the audience here?  People who want a mediocre version of Bal-Sagoth to ween their grandmas off of Perry Como?  Really, who wants to listen to this?  It’s not HORRIBLE, but it’s entirely uninteresting.

This is notable for having really fucking loud drums but really nothing else.  It’s generic mid to late ’90s death metal that does absolutely nothing new.  I counted one interesting riff a third into ‘No Repent’ and everything interesting pretty much ended at that point.  It’s not bad, it’s just yet another in an endless list of forgotten oldschool death metal albums.

The production on this really sucks most of the time.  If it’s a fast section, the insanely loud bass drums cover everything and render the riffs inaudible.  During slower parts it’s better; it has a lot of ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’ reverb to it which works during the sporadic slow parts.  Unfortunately occasionally good production isn’t enough to make up for almost exclusively uninspired songwriting.  Occasionally the band lands on something kind of cool when they just go for a slow, early Fear Factory style part like on ‘Equanimity Lost’, which gives me a sort of weird feeling that’s hard to describe… Anyway, mostly this is just boring.  It strictly adheres to death metal convention without really sounding like any other band; they just sound like ‘death metal’ with atonal/sometimes melodic riffs, growly vocals, etc.  Woefully traditional, really.

So it doesn’t do anything new and what it does isn’t done well, so you can ignore this very easily.  I find it extremely unexciting on just about every level.  It’s not that the band has no potential, it’s just not exercised very much at all on this album.

I thought this was pretty boring the first time I listened to it, but apparently I wasn’t paying attention because in actuality it’s pretty good.  It might be the somewhat murky production that turned me off at first; it’s all guitars and to some degree vocals, drums are really quiet and submerged.  But when you get past that, this is riffy brutal death metal with some unique influences that remind me of Ancient Necropsy; you know, epic elements popping up where they ordinarily wouldn’t be, cool technical riffs, even the occasional slam.

Purulent Infection plays pretty standard start/stop brutal death metal most of the time.  The riffs are occasionally technical, but more often than not straightforward chugging and tremolo.  Occasionally an oldschool DM riff ala Saprogenic will be pulled out to spice things up, and it actually works pretty well when mixed in with the rest of the stuff, like on ‘Spreading Disease’.  It’s not really amazing stuff, but it’s capable and the emphasis on riffing over ‘brutality’ makes it more interesting than most; maybe the Saprogenic comparison fits in more ways than one.  Drums sound real and are well played, and vocals are the usual high gurgle/low growl mix.

Where this stuff gets awesome is when he really deviates and incorporates Egyptian or otherwise Middle Eastern guitar theatrics.  A hanging solo will burst out of nowhere with an epic, almost Behemoth-esque feel, which actually works well over equally epic tremolo riffing beneath it.  It’s almost like what Necrophagist does: tossing in huge bursts of melody out of nowhere and smashing the atonal riffing that composes most of the song.  I think Purulent Infection could stand to do it a bit more, but when he does, it’s totally awesome and, if not entirely unique, at least trying something different.  I like the juxtaposition of simple brutal death lyrical themes with stuff like this; gives it a bit of richness I think.

Anyway, thought the majority of this is straight brutal death, but it’s well-composed brutal death with catchy, oldschool riffs.  If you dig brutal death metal or if you like the modern style of technical DM with some added guitar theatrics, you’ll probably like this.  Hopefully this debut is just the first volley in a long and creative career for the band.

Damn if this isn’t the most generic title for a black metal release ever!  Fortunately the music isn’t nearly as boring.  Septrion’s a little-known Mexican black metal outfit that actually manages to stand out from the crowd due to pure strength in songwriting rather than gimmicks.  They play a very Norwegian style of modern black metal, with an emphasis on blast beats and tremolo riffs just as much as clean guitar passages and constantly twisting and turning songwriting.  It’s very good.

Septrion doesn’t do anything openly new.  They simply craft bigger, better riffs than other bands, have cleaner, more incisive production than others, and have a sense of brutality created by musicians who give a shit about what they’re doing.  There’s carefully constructed tempo changes that pass from raging blasting to epic Graveland-inspired sections without missing a beat, as well as a bit of late-Immortal style epic/melodic riffing.  It’s fairly creatively arranged, with some openly neoclassical guitar pits peppering the music throughout.  The best comparison I could draw is to newer Keep Of Kalessin in overall style.  I like how, I don’t know, ‘coherent’ the riffing is; the band has a very clear vision of the sound they’re going for and they make it work.  The vast majority of the music is conventional modern black metal, but Septrion just do it BETTER than others.  Plus there’s a neat Sarcófago cover which makes it that much better!

This isn’t a MANDATORY release to get, but if you’re a fan of modern black metal you’d be better off with it in your collection.  ‘Nocturnal Grimness’ is way ahead of most of the major bands out there today, and has production values on par with most of the guys on Candlelight.  I really recommend this; besides, there’s only 500 copies, and you want to be cult, don’t you?

This is total Neanderthal death metal, which makes it awesome.  It’s just pure Obituary worship from top to bottom with maybe a little Malevolent Creation and I’m pretty sure most of the music on this album was generated through the sound of knuckles dragging through dirt.  This is for people who feel that Six Feet Under is just too fancy for them and wish they had a better soundtrack for their trailer park shenanigans.

All the riffs are slow tremolo or thrash-based and taken directly from the ‘Cause Of Death’ mold.  It switches regularly between double bass passages and stomping rock beats, with vocals that are simply a lower version of John Tardy’s grotesque howling.  It’s utterly simple and devoid of even a hint of subtlety.  ‘Sex.Violence.Death.’ actually sets death metal back a decade whenever it’s played.  Never has a chosen band name been so horribly appropriate.

And all those reasons are why it’s AWESOME!  Lowbrow is absolutely devoid of pretense on this release, just cranking out simple, heavy-as-fuck oldschool death metal with sick vocals and excellent riffs.  This is the logical album for every fan of Jungle Rot’s stupid, stupid music, or those that think early Death was pretty much the pinnacle of human art.  This album’s entirely composed of slow, rocking grooves and growls about utterly generic death metal subjects.  If you’ve heard ‘Cause Of Death’ you LITERALLY KNOW what this sounds like.  There’s nothing more to it!  It’s oldschool death metal!

I love this because it’s so intentionally dumb and most people will probably hate it for the same reason.  If you like your death metal to sound like it’s composed by a special education classroom, this is the most amazing thing you’ll ever hear in your life.

Super raw, noisy black metal here, but it’s actually well written and competently played!  Essentially all the songs are just short bursts of oldschool black/thrash riffing bound together with insane, throat-shredding screams and overly fast, frantic drumming.  If you don’t like this style you’ll hate it, that much is a given, but people who like it will… well, smoke more crack and give each other tattoos in alleys I guess.

Pretty much imagine the punkiest stuff that was played in early Darkthrone, triple the speed and half the production.  It’s super fast and raw, and the fastness and rawness are essentially the whole goal of the music.  There’s other stuff that’s cool aside from just those features, though.  The riffing is far from sheer noise; there’s dozens of really great, oldschool black/thrash riffs right out of early Mayhem and similar artists.  It’s not instrumentally crude like so many of these sorts of bands are; the members can all play in time with each other and not fuck up riffs and drum beats left and right, amazingly enough.  The production pretty much sucks, not that that’s surprising; it’s excruciatingly thin and ridiculously distorted, but never to the point where it gets unlistenable.  It’s just designed to add to the brutality.  The band’s name is Raw Hatred for fuck’s sake, it’s not going to be like Kamelot.

All the songs are pretty much the same: super fast blast beats, three to five chord tremolo riffs, and SCREECH SCREECH SCREECH all over everything.  It’s one-dimensional as fuck but they never claimed to be any different.  The thing is, it has great riffs that are even catchy sometimes, it’s super raw and brutal, and I get the sense that the members have been deeply inconvenienced in one way or another.  If you love noisy, raw black metal, there’s not much that’s better than this.

This is certainly an interesting idea: haunting black/death deeply influenced by dark ambient and drone doom.  Perhaps even more interesting is that it’s executed well and in a surprisingly listenable way.  Again surprising is that it’s not gimmicky or overdone in any way; its latent weirdness is rather subtle.  It’s strange enough that most people will detect that something’s off, but it doesn’t need to shout its unusual influences from the rooftops.

I really love the first two tracks on this demo; throbbing, ritualistic black/death with a very heavy, resonant, and oppressive production.  The riffs, primarily tremolo based, and always simple, repetitive, and ambient in texture, are clearly influenced by ambient black metal artists, but there seems to be a sense of early ’90s death metal theatricism about them as well, sort of like Incantation’s slower works but more interesting.  I love the guitar tone; it’s warm and yet it seems like it’s electronically manufactured, playing riffs that alternate between smooth malevolence and upwardly climbing Summoning-style atmosphere.  Vocals are a very rich, throaty growl, not unlike what you’d hear from a Demilich worship band.  Keyboards are very, very quietly, almost subliminally used as an additional melodic voice.  The production is phenomenal; murky, submerging the (acoustic) drums under a mist of guitars and monstrous vocals.  Both tracks are fantastic and point to a band with absolutely amazing songwriting abilities and conceptual understanding of how to make good extreme metal.

The final track will be more polarizing.  ‘In The Tomb Of Sleeping Children’ is a twenty minute electronic drone track that very slowly shifts tones and drone layers in a totally ambient fashion.  Almost inaudible samples of voices dart under the drone tracks, essentially unintelligible, and the only real musical change comes near the end, where a tribalistic drum beat steps in.  I’m not sure if it works or not; sometimes it captures a dark, occult atmosphere, other times it’s, well, a twenty minute electronic drone track.  Bigger drone fans would probably appreciate it more; I think of it as an extended outro from the first two songs more than a full-fledged experience myself.

Even if you don’t dig the third track, the first two are more than enough reason to acquire this demo.  Sjenovik makes a totally unique and masterful style of black/death metal that deserves a lot of attention from the underground scene; it carries the atmosphere of extreme doom and puts it into a more listenable form that loses none of its potency in transit.  Definitely worthy of exploration and study.

The short-lived project of several of central Florida’s black metal musicians, Wolfenreich was an NSBM outfit that cranked out a few demos and this EP before disbanding.  The band played a traditional style of surprisingly well written raw, riff-oriented black metal, and ‘Onslaught’ was easily the best work the outfit turned out in their brief and stormy existence.  Beneath the raw production of this CDr is a flame of real intensity and musical talent that was likely extinguished too soon.

A clear similarity to the riffing of Lunar Reign can be found in the guitar department, courtesy of Spectral, leading member of both artistic endeavors.  Wolfenreich employed a similar style atonal, US-oriented riffing (albeit with a toned down technical edge) to Lunar Reign, but added just a pinch of early Norwegian sound to the mix, creating a solid variation between more technical passages and slightly more grooving, straightforward ones.  The drum performance is very solid, but buried deeply under the raw, noisy guitar tone, with all but the bass drums and cymbals rendered inaudible during the tremolo sections.  Vocals are a mid-ranged, traditional rasp which meshes well with the instrumental presence.  A surprising level of atmosphere is maintained on songs like ‘Vermin Wither’, where the band creates a good amount of tension between blasting and slower-paced sections, which is balanced by more straightforward tracks like ‘Blasphemous Ghoul Rite’, which is clearly very influenced by ‘Under A Funeral Moon’-era Darkthrone in its rhythm and melodies.

It’s too bad that Wolfenreich broke up so soon; ‘Onslaught’ showed that the band had more potential than just about any of the other black metal bands in the central Florida scene, and would have been served well by continuing.  But this EP is a good tombstone for the band, solid all the way through and never lacking in great riffs or interesting song structures.  Recommended for all underground black metal fans.

R.I.P. Nya.

Organic Infest play a sort of shredding, epic, melodic/technical death metal that would be listenable if it weren’t for the awfully murky production of this album.  The guitar tone is very muffled and lacks any sort of sharpness, which is sort of a problem on an album that’s all about epic, technical guitar lines…

Get past that though and there IS a core of good songwriting, though you have to dig to find it.  The melodic style of Organic Infest’s riffing is rather unique, with sort of a power/death fusion flair to them which is more unique than most.  A definite sense of epic songwriting is here, like you’re in a pulp fantasy novel, with narrative song structures and a very cinematic style of writing.  All the instruments are played very well, and I can’t see any weak songs really.  But then again, music is an art form based on sound, and it’s sort of a problem when you can’t hear it well enough to fully appreciate it…

The production really harms this release.  I can’t even make an excuse of ‘listen to the music, not the sound’ in this case.  It’s just bad.  Rehearsal room drumming overwhelms the growly vocals and the aforementioned guitar tone just sounds like an angrily buzzing keyboard, and as a whole it ruins the sense of immersion that the band is striving for on ‘The Way To Temptation’.  Occasionally when the band is at their best you’re able to ignore the bad sound quality, but most of the time Organic infest simply isn’t that good.  They have an interesting variety of very melodic yet still brutal death metal, and some of the riffing ideas are rather unique, but overall, the music isn’t THAT well written to make you ignore such a glaring flaw.

This isn’t bad musically but the production makes this sort of a deal-killer.  Unless you’re able to get past it I can’t whole-heartedly recommend it.  I wish they’re re-record it in a proper studio and give the material the treatment it really deserves.

This is a departure from the previous Whorelord demo quite a bit, with significantly more brutal death metal, less oldschool hardcore, and more of the modern toughguy variety to make up for it.  There’s a lot more in the way of straightforward breakdowns, but also a lot more death metal riffing and blast beats to make up for it.  In short, it’s pretty much where you’d expect the band to go: AWESOME!  Which isn’t a preposition but grammar isn’t metal, fuck you.

The fact that this is closer to traditional ideas of ‘deathcore’ makes it no less dick-hammeringly heavy than Whorelord always is.  Opening with ‘Animal Cunt’, their fastest and most straightforward brutal death metal song to date (with oddly worse production than the other two studio tracks), it gets a bit more sophisticated from there, with the title track having an immensely cool hardcore opening followed by something like eight breakdowns and blast segments, each better than the last.  The studio tracks culminate in ‘I Am Rapture’, another more death metal influenced track that ignites with a Jungle Rot-inspired breakdown halfway through.  The production on these latter two tracks is excellent, sacrificing none of the filth and heaviness but adding to instrumental clarity.  The last track is a two-song live clip that presents a very raw, brutal view of the band, with super loud guitars and even more punishing vocals and drums than usual.

Well, if you liked the last demo you’ll just like this even more, so there’s no reason not to get it.  Whorelord is probably the Great Deathcore Hope for a lot of people and their insane talent hasn’t ended here.  Now if they’d just release a goddamn full-length so I can properly bask in the glory of the Lord Ov Whores.