Demo

Black metal is simply brimming with ideology. Individualism, always setting oneself apart from others. Acknowledgement, eternally paying homage to the legends of black metal, a pantheon of men in makeup with silly names that varies surprisingly little between the various and otherwise diverse creeds. Aesthetics, occasionally visual, always aural - the production standards of black metal have almost entirely disappeared from unrelated styles, while two decades have now been spent attempting to perfect every degree of these sounds. There are more that need not be enumerated here.

All of these constitute Murustrictus. More or less, every convention of black metal is mixed together here - tremolo chords, raspy vocals, lots of treble that fizzes out into the atmosphere of the album. The atmosphere is a mixture of the hiss of the guitar amps and the cymbals, seemingly unmixed. It's nothing out of the ordinary, it has been done better many times, but it does help give the unimaginative performances a bit more feeling.

The drumming is full of fills, a fairly unique aspect to this album, but it is often out of time. The entire performance and recording is very sloppy, everyone seems to be marching to the beat of a different drummer, which may be why the drummer opted for so many fills, to try to outplay the boring drummers and broken timekeepers in the guitarists heads. The roughness in performance and production is reminiscent of the black metal coming from Finland for the past decade or so, but the performances are sloppy enough that they make Horna's off-releases seem tight. It's not pretty, and it's not ugly enough to stop and gawk.

While the odd drumming stands out a bit, it doesn't really stand out in a good way. The rest of the music blends into tired conventions of black metal that have all been executed better countless times before. The band almost does a respectable job of mimicing others, but they fall short of any of it really being enjoyable. Comprehensive mediocrity stands behind a thin veil of unmastered aesthetics - a few listens to this over a few weeks and there simply isn't much to enjoy about it, it has lots of weaknesses and no real strengths, nothing to look past the flaws to enjoy. The flaws show through a little more with each listen, and the lack of substance is incredibly apparent.

In a sea of black metal demos, it's easy to sail past this one.