Down Below the Fog

This appears to be a slightly more legitimate version of Striborg's 'I have no idea what's good so I'll just release it and hope for the best' philosophy. Striborg ranges from pretty good to terrible whereas Extinction is marginally above average- for what is undeniably bedroom black metal, anyway. It's not especially competent music in any way, though the production is representative enough for the style; the guitarwork is occasionally choppy and off time, the programming seems off-the-cuff and somewhat random and the vocals just kind of spray everywhere and nowhere, but hell, did anyone expect anything different from a release like this?

These songs are constructed in a pretty random, haphazard manner; they're collections of strange, amorphous, mildly dissonant tremolo riffs stretched taut over stretches of machine-provided blasting, contrasting with an edge of murky dark ambiance that comes in on its own tracks as well as around the edges of the black metal compositions. The result is, again, something not unlike Striborg; it has that intensely amateurish quality, like the person making it is fundamentally ignorant of black metal conventions. It certainly has its moments; the bonus track on the Todestrieb reissue is easily the best, being the most coherent and with a sort of snappy memorability to its riffs which is generally absent on the other tracks. It's the most songy one here, and the others tend to not really sound like full-fledged ideas as much as a bunch of creative scribbling; ideas stop and start fairly randomly, riffs churn in one direction then the other, like a small child spinning in a circle and then abruptly reversing the course of revolution. The main issue is that the songs are so still; they revolve around a collection of simple ideas but don't progress anywhere- they just sink.

This isn't really bad but I can't say it promises much for the future and the overall impression I get from Extinction is that it's a fairly self-indulgent bit of experimentation that isn't designed to do much. That's fine, but I wonder why something like this was re-released as a pro CD when its initial tape run of 50 copies was probably more than enough to satisfy anyone who likes this sort of thing.