Description

Black vinyl with one bonus track not available on the original demo

Hate Forest have garnered a cult classic status in the black metal scene. Though its two core members are also important members in the more popular band Drudkh. The Curse is essentially a demo version of Hate Forest debut album “The Most Ancient Ones”. The key differences between this release and “The Most Ancient Ones” is that this version is faster, has rougher production and less developed song structures. While I bring up repetition in Drudkh, Hate Forest is a band that’s actually recognized for their monotonous song structure. The Most Ancient Onces in particular parallels with Transylvanian Hunger in that all of their songs have exactly the same tempo. The beat never changes and the drums don’t do any fancy fills. Despite this, the songs have a surprising amount of depth to them. The riffs are repetitive, but do change themselves at proper timings and even the drums switching from blast beats to double bass adds just the right amount of variety to keep the songs interesting. The really raw production and obvious analog recording have a significant factor in this. The guitar sounds dirty as the thickets and swamps inside this haterade-drinking forest and is complemented by the churning of a muddy sounding bass guitar. The band seemed to want to go for this dark foresty atmosphere and have definitely succeeded in doing so. This album is misanthropic and brooding as a result. Hate Forest would end up cleaning up their sound on subsequent albums and it’s rather disappointing that they did. Roman Saenko and Roman Blagih (Thurios) duo the vocals in this band and the result is pretty effective. Roman S is the main deliverer with his rather death metal esque guttural approach while Thurios appears sometimes by himself and more often screaming alongside Roman S at occasional points. It adds a fair bit of uniqueness to the band. Low guttural vocals aren’t very common in black metal and Thurios screams here are far more sinister sounding compared to his delivery in Drudkh’s songs. When they go together, the vocal assault is really formidable. The songs on this demo are slightly faster than their counterparts on “The Most Ancient Ones” and I see that as a good thing too. Personally I prefer these versions of the songs to their studio versions as I think it gives it a rawer, more cold feel.

Track list
1. Inmost Winter
2. To The Thickets And Swamps
3. Black Forest
4. The Most Ancient Ones
5. The Elders
6. Darkness
7. The Night Of Winter Solstice
8. The Curse
9. Cold Of The Grave