Impenetrable Darkness

After a Burzum-influenced dungeon synth intro that's alright, but not a very great way to kick off a very primitive and noisy demo, and ends too abruptly when the first real track is a fade-in. Anyway, the music on the demo all kind of sounds the same. I don't mean in that it's repetitive or overlong, but the songs are so homogenised in their rhythms that sometimes it's hard to tell them apart. Aside from this, you will find run-of-the-mill raw black metal in Impenetrable Darkness, with seldom in the guitar work except for sequences of evil tremolo-picking that alters between 3 notes, giving a limit to the creativity of this release, making it far less memorable than it could be, since the decrepit production warrants a very stripped down but also ambient release similar to the Les Legions Noires (at least the good bands in the Les Legions Noires).

What I mean by this is that, even though the instruments can all be heard clearly, it sounds like a live recording of the band rehearsing. This in theory sounds like a bad thing, but the way that the instruments are combined with natural reverb and a high level of distortion gives Impenetrable Darkness a morbid and powerful sound. What is slightly disappointing about this is that the songwriting cannot back this organic and unprocessed sound up because of the monotonous sound that, while good in terms of black metal, just doesn't do much to build on the core of the songs, and feels like one idea stretched out for 20 minutes. Danse Macabre is really the only track that deviates from the same type of riffs with some isolated guitar tracks, and even then is very barebones. This lack of variety and vivid song development is why this demo is pretty good but not great.