AbNORMAL

Some black metal bands tend to take stuff not as serious as others and maybe the German band Abnormal falls into this category. The opening of the release would be a sample from the movie Erik the Viking; the quote above, such spoken at the beginning of the first track, would roughly translate to: stop, stop, stop, we delay the emergency slaughter. Rather unconventional and not really fitting into the whole concept of the album, because once it is over and another spin is taken, the question arouses what the purpose of this short sample has been and what its place in the overall concept would be.

Anyway, four tracks and over twenty-two minutes are offered and Abnormal does their best to keep pace and variation up. It is not easy to describe their art as each composition comes basically in a slightly different style and it sounds like the band tried to explore a vast realm of possibilities with their first demo release. Faster parts, but slower ones work as a counter-point, different vocal styles, a distinguishable bass in the background, catchy rhythms and melodies ... from these facts it should become obvious that Abnormal's art is already interesting and an attempt to avoid the fallacies a lot of bands from the underground suffer from. Urfaust, Krypt, Burning Witch, Mayhem are cited by the band as influences and Belmez should be added, due to some strange rhythms used on some rare occasions.

Well, I cannot even say that this is a bad release. Despite the lack of a general idea or a red line, the songs are still well executed and the level of being annoying is kept quite low, even though the whole stuff sounds at times a bit chaotic. The production could be better of course and also the mix, but good ideas do generally not suffer much from this aspect and such is the case here. The opening riff of Mindless is quite cool and catchy and also the second part of Devotion to Death has some nice moments. There is certainly much worse stuff out there in the wild world of the black metal underground. As this demo dates back to 2007, a new one should be lie in the realm of possibilities.

Recommended tracks: Mindless, Devotion to Death