Dysthymya

Dysthymya are a black metal band from Romania. They differentiate themselves from most of the bedroom crowd by having a sizable amount of ambient influence. Despite this, the demo’s rather hard to swallow. The different songs share almost nothing, and feature completely separate recordings and tones. This makes it damn hard to view the demo as one, cohesive whole.

The first song, Forest of Ice, is probably the best, or at least the one with the fewest faults. It opens with something that sounds somewhat like a door opening. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but it’s short enough to not matter. The intro riff is enjoyable and atmospheric, although it’s somewhat marred by the fluctuating volume levels and weak production.

Then, without any warning whatsoever, we’re thrust into a tremolo riff. This isn’t a bad riff, per say, just a bland and uninteresting one. The blast beats backing it are ineffective and weak, as well. The riff eventually begins to build up to something, which turns out to be a somewhat-ambient middle section. Despite the inherent structural/pacing clusterfuck of [i]building[/i] to an [i]interlude[/i], the passage is quite effective. Everything just jumps ahead again with the earlier tremolo riff, which brings the song to a close.

The second track, Mountain of Gloom, is plagued by the worst guitar tone I’ve ever heard. It’s not bad in a bland way, nor a poorly produced way. No, this is the kind of thing where you actually have to [i]try[/i] to make it that awful. The sound is somewhere between a buzzing bee and what might happen if you made a mouth out of rubber and then slapped it around a bit.

The vast majority of this song is a repetitive tremolo riff, but the whole thing’s ruined by the fact that no matter how strong a riff was played, it simply couldn’t conquer a tone like that. Everything lunges forward for a far more aggressive segment for a bit, before resorting to the tremolo riff, which sounds almost like something you might find at a carnival on the second play through. The drums are utterly inaudible throughout the entire thing, save for the aggressive bars that crop up now and again. The vocals are standard shrieks. They’re not particularly good, but there’s nothing wrong with them either, and they’re passable.

This all eventually ends and we’re treated to a pure ambient section, which has what I think is running water. This is soon joined by an organ, which repeats the same few notes for a while. It’s decent, if not particularly evocative. When this has gone on for long enough it simply disappears, and the tremolo leaps back out of the shadows to dance on our graves for a bit, before the whole thing simply ends, with absolutely no preamble, nor shred of climax, in sight.

Homeland is at once the band’s best and worst song. It starts with a single guitar playing a fairly interesting riff, which’s somewhat reminiscent of Burzum’s Dunkleheit. A second guitar later comes in and merely serves to make it muddier, but it still survives. The drumming’s rather bland, but decent. What makes this so good, though, is that it has [i]momentum[/i], something that the other songs all lacked. This riff actually drives the song, and makes you want to stick around and hear where it goes. It never really changes much, but this is the kind of riff that can carry a song, if not always spectacularly.

Then the vocals come in. They’re clean…and awful. There is absolutely no force, passion or drive to them whatsoever. For a comparison, picture Jesu’s singing on their self titled…only atrocious, and done by someone who’s voice sounds anything but mature. In addition, the vocal melodies feel painfully forced, almost as if the singer was reading from the lyrics sheet for the first time as singing them.

This demo on the whole is rather hard to recommend. There’re a few interesting ideas, primarily in the first and third tracks, but they’re unfortunately marred by a series of poor choices and confusing decisions. The band needs to work on their transitions far more, as well as their production, before they can hope to make a cohesive, powerful work.

This demo is a strange beast, it sounds like three different bands, with three different levels of technical proficiency, three different production techniques, and three different ideas on what kind of music they should play.

The first two songs have similar elements, Fast beginnings and fast outros surrounding slower melodic/ambient passages. It’s structurally similar to some Silencer, but with none of the grandeur and compositional skills. This is clearly a bedroom band, and often sounds extremely messy, unprofessional, overly simplistic and well, shit as per the style. But at the same time Mountain of Gloom demonstrates at least a basic understanding of how multiple guitars should interact, despite the extremely rubbery and artificial sounding rhythm guitar sounding like a moderately faster 666Satanic Army666. Oddly enough, on the other two songs the guitars sound very natural, yet still reasonably sloppy.

That's probably the strangest thing about this demo, each of the three songs are completely different. Forest of Ice is a fast instrumental with natural sounding, speedy guitars with a simplistic slow melody picked for a minute or two through the middle. The second number is also quite fast, but uses a chuggier riff (Which horrifyingly brings up memories of 666SA666 as I mentioned earlier) with a contrasting lead riff, and while it too uses an break section through the middle, it adds a true ambient section before returning to terrible fast riff and shrill screamed vocals. And for some reason it’s produced far worse than the other two songs with inaudible drums and a unnatural electronic rubbery guitar sound utilized by many of the shittier bedroom bands around.

The third song is different again, showing the band trying both a clean vocal style and a repetitive melodic guitar pattern. Despite being the most initially difficult to enjoy track on this demo, because of the woefully poor clean vocal performance, this is actually the most promising song here. Sure, its just one simple riff for the whole 5 minute duration, but they don't make many noticeable mistakes playing it, and it’s really quite a listenable piece. Not to mention the guitars are mixed a lot better than both of the other songs, helping Homecoming sound like the thickest, most fully realized number here. The clean vocals are rubbish, there's no "Oh you're just not getting it" like Nattramn or Lord Worm, this guy simply can't sing. There is no power behind his voice, no control and he sounds like's just hit puberty. But, he does attempt some vocal lines with some bigger ideas, which if they were performed in a passable manner would make the song seem like it's got some good, forward thinking ideas in it.

This demo is very scatterbrained, and shows that the band is still developing and trying to find a desired direction to go in. None of the songs are really any good, but all of them have occasional good ideas in them, and the sheer number of ideas at least demonstrates that the band is at least trying to be something more than another useless clone band. Not that they're being terribly original, but there a hints of Forgotten Tomb, Silencer, Burzum, Darkthrone and countless other bands around, so they're not just mimicking one band. They're nowhere near figuring out what they want to do yet, nor are they anywhere near being a solid band yet, but hell, it's a bedroom black metal band that's trying something.