Touch the Wind

Musician’s fate is a strange thing. Someone has tons of money by the end of the 80s, somebody became public’s favourite after several decades, and some didn’t manage to live the dream and became a hairy folks’ idol. The socialist bloc scene is a great illustration to this. While poles Turbo toured the Europe and released their albums on Noise Records, Czech garages nurtured the seeds of evil in form of Root and Master’s Hammer, in Serbian (Yugoslavian back then) city called Beograd a speed metal band called Demoniac was formed. They managed to record a few demo tapes and a tape LP, and change the lineup a bit before finding a record deal with Yugoslavia’s cult Explosive Records and heading to a studio to record their first and, unfortunately, the last LP.

By that time classic metal genres in the West were pressured by a wave of grunge on one side and slowly rising black metal tide on the other. The best days of speed metal were long gone by, even the genre’s founding fathers Helloween turned to commercial rock and the majority of less fortunate bands just ceased to be. That’s why for its’ time, the material of “Touch The Wind” sounds archaic, worsened by the terrible production. The album sound is watery, which is doomingly dangerous to this kind of music, paired with poor recording quality. On top of everything else, drums sounds like synthesized electronic kit, which creates a need to get accustomed to it while listening. However, don’t let all that turn you back. Turn your attention to music, that’s where Demoniac start to get interesting.

It’s noticeable from the first notes that musicians were heavily influenced by German speed power: high-speed but melodic tracks, high vocals and, the most important of it all, riffs that are catchy as hell. Not every East European band could boast of such songwriting skills and the level of professionalism. Actually, what concerns music here is all well, the downside is only the implementation. Although the lyrics are written in bad English, they fit quite well into the album, all these anti-war hymns and reflections on human freedom are pleasant to listen to. It may seem that this record is yet another underground album, not in any way different from any other one, but there is an interesting peculiarity to be discovered while listening which has changed my attitude towards the album.

The year of 1992 was a difficult one not only to heavy music but to Yugoslavia as well. The country was falling apart, the best way to describe life there at that time is a phrase “it’s good you made it out alive”. Yugoslavian musicians were, obviously, affected as well. Prominent Satanists Bombarder have self-disassembled for a period, a deviant “punk by nation, friend by profession” Satan Panonski took a bullet defending his motherland Croatia. But Demoniac did recorded their album, and, according to witnesses, were active a few years past that. All this had left a mark on the record: it seems while listening that there is an imminent uneasiness in the air. Thanks to such atmosphere, “Touch the Wind” is easily perceived as a little masterpiece.

But, as I have stated above, fate is a strange thing. Though Demoniac left warm memories in the hearts of Serbian metalheads of the 90s, but could not attain a real success and didn’t make it to the new millennium. In many ways the printing is to blame: there was, according to some data, not more than half a thousand individual records; some of them were destroyed by NATO bombings in 1999, and those that survived are now selling $100 and up on auctions. Tape editions could not change the overall picture and make the band more popular. And this is quite sad, because that made this little art piece be left in shadow for so many years and now it can only be appreciated by the most oldschool die-hard metalheads that won’t make a deal out of album production and the fact that it’s not widely known. Let’s just hope that some proper label will take on the re-release of the Demoniac material. They deserve it.