Live Promo MMXXI

I can’t say exactly what my feelings are when I read the words “black/death metal live promo”, but you can be sure that delight is not among them. These kind of affairs generally have awful production quality, dubious objectives, and offer scant interest for any but the most notorious of live bands. Knowing that Live Promo MMXXI from Civerous consists of just one track on the digital version makes me shiver in dread, since 4 songs are performed over the 32 minute duration, all of which appeared on Decrepit Flesh Relic about 6 months after this release.

To be honest, there’s no evidence that this is a live recording at all, seeing as zero crowd noise can be heard and the levels on the mix accord pretty much to a regular studio job. It could be a rehearsal in the studio I suppose, but the differences between this and the songs on the full-length would make it worthwhile for fans to hear both or at least to hear a more molten version of the same monstrous extreme metal concept. Essentially, this sounds about as massive and powerful as my other experience of Civerous, with the band capable of reproducing the studio album songs in terms of brutality, technicality, and atmosphere. The guitar predominates slightly, burying the vocals at times, while even the nuance of the creepy second guitar parts come through clearly, which turns the whole experience into a more physical event than the rather abstract though still bruising heaviness of the final recording.

It’s worth noting that Civerous make no attempt to include - or perhaps hadn’t yet written - the violin part preceding the conclusion of ‘Spiral of Eyes’, although the clean section that accompanied it is present. Other than that, I don’t pick out so many obvious alterations, probably favouring this version of ‘Herodacy’ slightly because of the way the guitar might otherwise be ignored with the vocals more in play. Once or twice, noticeably at the start of ‘The Bone Wreathe’ (‘Bone Wreath’ on the album), a bit of feedback and amp noise comes through, which was surely unintentional. However, as I’ve said, I don’t see this release as much of a live album, more as an alternate, less finessed version of Decrepit Flesh Relic.