Demonica

Black metal Behemoth. Fuck. Yeah. Suffice to say their blackened death stuff isn’t horrible, but their gold will always be in the creepy, atmospheric, raw black metal that they do rather well. This album is an amalgamation of all their demos and some unreleased tracks, and I got to say it is rather impressive. It’s got an intensely dark atmosphere helped by the eerie fillers, horror-movie esque-riffs and the tortured vocals of Nergal.

One of the great factors of this album, I found, is where the band found the right niche for production. It isn’t clean, like Dimmu Borgir, so you don’t lose any atmosphere, yet it is clean enough that you can actually hear the instruments individually. As I mentioned before, there is a sort of empty, hollow atmosphere to this added by the creepy fillers/samples, these usually being in the vein of a dark synth with satanic chant or a wolf howling at the moon etc, which gives an all round amazingly evil vibe. The covers of Aggressor and Deathcrush are pretty good too. Hellhammer and Mayhem obviously do it better, but this is quite solid, and surprisingly enough they don’t kill the atmosphere despite being fairly “fun” black metal songs.

The axe work on here is actually fairly diverse for black metal. Your average song is your blistering fast riffs, but there are also a lot of dark, mellow slower riffs which are cool. A lot of the riffs retain melody to, but not in a weak way like Dimmu Borgir or later Lord Belial. You also have the odd acoustic guitar included to add an interesting kind of medieval feel to it, like in the song “From Hornedlands to Lindisfarne”, which can also be noted for using some cool, dark synths. The guitar work isn’t really that technical to be honest, but there is the odd melodic solo and fills which are satisfactory. This all together fits in with the dynamic drum work, which is not your standard double-bass barrage, in fact it is barely ever like that, even during the fast songs. The drumming is usually fairly diverse incorporating the entire drum set most of the time, yet even when the drumming is slow, you can still head bang to it! The sound on it is also quite perfect. It’s bassy, yet not so much that it drowns out anything else, but so much that it comes off as powerful.

Nergal actually displays a fairly diverse range when it comes to black metal vocals; he is almost a mime to every style. In some songs he is able to do the talking-style of bands like Mayhem, the high pitched, incoherent screech like Emperor, the average black metal vocals and then his unique, deep growl on the blackened death song "Transylvanian Forest". His voice always fits the atmosphere to each song, as some songs are more relevant to a more tortured voice or maybe angry vox. The lyrics generally cover topics such as Satan, death, suicide and winter, typical black metal from Scandinavia, so nothing remarkable there.

I must say, for a demo album, Demonica is listenable in every sense, instead of just being a history lesson about the band. You do get some repetition because some songs are fused into others, but this is rare. If you are a fan of black metal, especially Behemoths’ early work, check this out now. If you are missing some of their black metal work, here is one last fix.