Description

Still sealed digipak

Demo material recorded in Helsinki and Bangkok in July 2008. Holocausto agreed to release the material, as he thought these versions were superior (despite sampled drums) to the album versions. Anyone who has managed to hold on for the many twists and turns that have occurred with this bands music since the early 90s demos, all the way through the ambient interlude period to the present day will find a lot of familiar elements at play here, but the manner of their mixture is quite different from what would be expected as a follow up to the largely traditional sounding blackness of ‘Engram’. The best way to describe this album is as a hybrid of the extremely noise-ridden, otherworldly character of “Drawing Down The Moon” and the lingering, dream-like ambient landscapes of the two non-metal albums that followed it. In some respects, one could speculate as to whether these guys started listening to Nadja and a handful of funeral doom bands as some common elements of noisy, dissonant distorted guitar riffs are combined with a very slow, restrained mixture of straight doom beats and mechanical sounding background ambiences. Granted, there has always been a fairly sizable doom influence on this band’s sound, but not quite to this extent. Perhaps the greatest charm of Beherit’s approach to a droning, noise drenched sound is that they tend to progress a bit more and don’t fully avoid occasional elements of consonance that were heavily present during the ambient eras of Ildjarn and Burzum. “Demon Advance” actually does give off a vibe of advancing, albeit at a pretty slow rate, and manages to filter through a number of spacey keyboard figures as the nasty, hateful guitar lines remain constant. Perhaps the only things that really keeps this song from being excellent is the weak clean vocal passages which sound weak and out of tune, the poor drum production and lack of variation in the beat, which don’t fit well with a set of slowly progressing motives. Fortunately the second half of this fairly large scale 2 song release proves to be a good bit stronger and more focused. Definite echoes of the dense, dark, mystical feel of “Drawing Down The Moon” are all over this, along with a somewhat more techno-like character to the repetitious drum lines. NHV’s vocals are goblin-like and whisper-prone, fitting in nicely with the effects steeped guitars and occasionally horrific sounding keyboard additives. This is the sort of song that would fit in nicely with a shorter theatrical attraction of the classical horror genre, as one can almost fully visualize the figure of Nosferatu within the creepy mixture of sounds that fills the whole 13 minutes of this thing. This is a tough one to fully nail down for any individual looking for something that resembles the stereotypical definition of black metal. Suffice to say, it’s definitely not something that will negotiate well with someone who likes this band solely for what they did on “Engram”. But anyone who immerses themselves in the world of drone/doom and ambient music will probably want to check this thing out. It’s the sort of music to meditate to if one wishes to acquire visions along the lines of a nightmare sequence in a Stephen King story.

Track listing:
1. Demon Advance
2. Celebrate The Dead