During my ‘career’ in various noisy and horrible bands (the names of which shall remain secret, despite patent ease of discovery should one wish) I have played on bills with many an enterprising group who produce for me some kind of demo. This will traditionally be a CDR (I’m not quite old enough to say tape) or increasingly some kind of download link.
Much of this stuff is invariably crap: dogged by woefully non-existent production and shoddy replication; however on occasion these issues are mere hurdles on the track to true cult underground greatness, and that’s what I’m going to be writing about in these demo reviews.
Perhaps we should make it clear what I regard as a demo. Basically if the band made it themselves without the help (i.e. money) of any record company then it’s a demo. If they recorded it in a studio but paid for it themselves then it’s a demo. If I like it and wanna review it here despite whatever infraction against stated principles then it’s a demo. Got it?
So, Abstractions… by Northern metal types Diascorium then- what’s it like? asks the rhetorical audience consisting of mid thirties bores I imagine this is written for. “Sweet” I would say to them. Because it is a really good piece of work, this EP.
Diascorium’s music is a well-stirred mix of various extreme metal tropes: Death metal slamming (non-wigger), Black Metal shimmering bleakness, Doomy breakdowns and Grindcore-type inventiveness of the Relapse Records variety.
Sure, most people I know and speak to on a daily basis won’t be able to tell any of those genres apart, or even have heard any music from said genres (like, even Immortal) so I may have well as made them up. But that’s the point, this group are discerning. They have put together their fast/fast/slllloooowwww/riff music with the confident craft that comes from hours of listening to Cephalic Carnage, and it’s as creative as it is enjoyable.
For those of us who like nothing more than loud guitars, fleet-footed drumming and ghastly paedo-wizard (that one goes out to H.O.B) vocalisations this EP delivers in spades.
For the other 99% of you bed wetting sops the track ‘Cnidaria’ goes all philharmonic and shit at the end so I suppose you might like that little bit, and wonder why the rest of the time this band make horrid devil music.
There’s this one song called ‘Self Modifying Game’ and I’m not sure what it’s about (actually I am, the lyrics are provided and make it pretty clear) but is sounds like it might be the title of an earlier 90’s GOOD Outer Limits episode: one that features Rob Lowe as a suspiciously hunky research scientist who is trying (ultimately in vain) to defeat a self-aware computer game virus he just accidentally made. The whole thing is based on a short story by Stanislaw Lem.
If any of this appeals I admonish you to download it from here: http://www.mediafire.com/?nqjm20yktnm
