Cholerik: Eine Aufarbeitung²

Round about one year after the formation of the black metal project Fäulnis by the young musician Seuche their first demo, "Choleric: Eine Aufarbeitung", has been released on Seuche's own label (NeoKlasSick). It contains 7 tracks, 4 of them act as "fillers" and only 3 of them can be identified as black metal which leads to a total album length of ~18 minutes. 18 minutes in which an affective murder is intonated. Therefore Seuche is confronting the listener with the rage, the escalation and the retrospective of the protagonist. Since the lyrics had been destroyed immediately after the recordings, because the band didn't care about them at this time, they won't be in the focus of this review.

The sound is exactly as raw and unpolished as you would expect it to be after reading "black metal" and "first demo" in the same sentence and the vocals had been mixed expectably silent, since the lyrics weren't important. The album begins with ~1.5 minutes of soft drumming and pained vocals (maybe caused by the victim), right before "Invokation" thematized the rage of the protagonist. To do so, the band used semi-fast black metal with lots of harmonic melodies, mainly in the vocals even if they come with flat clean singing. Apart from that, the vocals mainly consist of mediocre screams. Luckily very quietly, so that the attention doesn't fall on it. Overlooking their newer releases ("Gehirn zwischen Wahn und Sinn" and "Snuff || Hiroshima") one thing gets clear very soon: The change to the more punk-influenced vocals has been anything but a mistake.

After the ambient-interlude in which "Die Lästerzungen" von François Villon is being recited with desperate sounding speaking, the protagonist gets confronted with the escalation in "Gespien". While "Invokation" had soft melodies within its sound, "Gespien" presents nearly one minute of pure aggression and speeding, before "silence" takes over. Slow doomy riffs, industrial sounds in the background and a voice, clear, but distorted and exceptionally understandable. Contrary to the otherwise German lyrics, the ones presented here are in English. Afterwards the song ends the way it started: Speeding aggression.

The second interlude sounds like the vocals have been recorded backwards. Besides these vocals there is no music in here so let's head to the final. The retrospective is presented by the song "Die Tote am Flussufer" which has a structure similar to "Gespien", means black metal, then something calmer and again black metal, but here the black metal parts sound more like "Invokation" than "Gespien": they are melodic, dark and very atmospheric. Besides screams there are many growls and even clean vocals in this song. In the middle it gets quite melancholic, reflective and even a little folky caused by acoustic guitars and choral vocals. I mentioned vocals? These are similar to the last interlude and appear backwards.

The album ends with "Ausklang" and its spoken words ("Something happened to us in the woods....something evil") and no music at all, so the listener gets released out of an album that isn't that strong neither on the talent side of the musicians nor its sound, but therefore it has got its thick, eclectic atmosphere that slightly changes in the progression of the songs and fits very good into the given topic.