Devilry

Finnish black metal pioneers Barathrum released their demo Devilry in 1997. It includes four tracks that later would be re-recorded on their full-length album Legions of Perkele. The band abandoned some of their doom metal elements in favor of more traditional heavy metal influences.

The production has your typical 90s lo-fi black metal qualities and as this release is a demo you wouldn't expect anything else. It's very raw and bass heavy. Sadly the lo-fi production doesn't add any atmosphere to the music. Then again, what this demo lacks in atmosphere it makes up with handful of good riffs. Demonos Sovas vocals are as animalistic as ever, not your typical black metal shrieks. Just pure anger and hatred towards any things Christian. The lyrics are as always about Satan, occultism and hellfire and brimstone (with bunch of grammar errors). You know, vanilla black metal stuff.

This demo also has its problems. The aforementioned lack of atmosphere being a glaring one. While the songs are about Hell, Satan and all things infernal at no point I do get a feeling like I'm in Hell or being dragged into there. Another problem is that the opening track Nocturnal Ritual is lacking in riffs and instead focuses on chanted vocals over power chord chugga-chugga towards the end. While the chants sound nice and add flavour to the song it gets old pretty soon, let alone the fact that this is the first track on the demo which is supposed to hook the listener to listen the rest of the demo, not quit it before it even started. Luckily the Barathrum classic Last Day in Heaven comes to save the listener from boredom with some great riffs. The rest of the tracks are mediocre, not as bad as the opening track but passable.

So with one bad track, one good and two mediocre ones there's not much to say that this demo is aggressively "meh". Only recommended for die-hard Barathrum fans who want to hear some Legions of Perkele tracks with a rawer production. I doubt anyone else would get much out of this one.