The Black Crest of Death, the Gold Wreath of War

Originally I wasn't planning on reviewing this demo, but after listening to their full-length enough and seeing this cover art, I decided to give it a go. I am by no means a huge fan of black metal hailing outside of Europe, but I do listen to such bands occasionally, but this record hardly has any of the usual USBM elements (maybe apart from the use of synth). So here I am listening to a US/Canadian black metal band's 8 years old demo just because I enjoyed the recent full-length.

What we get here is 4 tracks from which 2 are the intro/outro of the record. The 2 remaining songs on the other hand are pretty long (both sit above 6 minutes) which makes up for the 4 minutes of ambient like atmosphere creation with the synth. While I am not a big fan of the extremely long intro/outro, I can't deny that they serve a purpose here and the atmosphere that they've created really helped the other 2 songs out. As you can see I am throwing the "atmospheric" term left and right, this might make you think that we are talking about one of those generic atmospheric black metal albums that the US scene loves to put out, but this isn't the case here. While it has the atmospheric element thanks to the aforementioned keyboard bits, it is purely classic black metal the way we all know and love it (alright, maybe it has a tiny bit of extra synth added to it).

Grim and cold yet still majestic. This is the easiest way to describe the entire demo. The vocals are your expected black metal vocals. It could be compared to the black metal era of Darkthrone (as many other bands can be compared to them too) with a slightly lesser quality than the aforementioned Norwegian demigods. Shouting and shrieking well mixed here with an extra layer of dying toad added. The somewhat raw-ish production also helps out the vocals by a lot making them even more terrifying. The riffs are on point (even though there isn't too many of them). They are dark, mysterious, grim and they are creeping inside your ears making sure you won't forget about them anytime soon. I have to also mention that the first full song, The Black Crest of Death, the Gold Wreath of War has an interesting almost Blood Fire Death era Bathory like vibe to it.

Overall this is a shinning example of that not every USBM band is horrible and there are still some well hidden gems outside of Europe too, but of course you have to get lucky to find them.