Black Abhorrent Metal

I'm having immense trouble finding ways to describe Fiend's music other than calling it black metal of the most typical sort. This is nearly a release dedicated to just reiterating all of black metal's most overused tropes, from atonal three-chord sawing riffs to new Darkthrone style black'n'roll and everywhere in between. If something has ever occurred in the European black metal scene, it's portrayed here. Everything is executed pretty well; the production is excellent for a demo and the songwriting is relatively catchy despite its utterly derivative nature, and all the technical performances are up to snuff, but in the end I'm still wondering why I should bother to listen to this at all.

The music is generally heavy on the fast thrash beats or slower rockish sections, the former with fast tremolo riffs and the latter with strummed chords. The riffs are capable enough for the music without actually being memorable at all; 'Necrosadist' is about the only track I remember anything from just because it's the rockiest of all the songs. While the demo overall has a good deal of variation, the tracks in and of themselves are rather simply constructed, with a handful of musical ideas alternating until an arbitrary moment of completion has been reached; there's nothing very climactic or exciting about any of these tracks. All of the material is good, but not good or unique enough to really be worth listening to simply because every idea on this disc can be found somewhere else in the metal scene. Unoriginality is fine, but the execution has to be particularly excellent to make up for it, and Fiend's generally unmemorable but pleasing enough music doesn't reach that bar.

The production is very good, being clean and full, and it probably would have been better used on a more interesting band. Fiend is one of those bands that ends up resembling black metal but no black metal bands in particular because all the elements they use are so distilled and typical that they defy being attributed to anything in particular. This doesn't result in a unique release: it just manages to be one of the blandest things in the world, all of which you've heard before but not in this EXACT configuration. It's as though Fiend goes deliberately out of their way to be unremarkable. About the only novel thing is the drumming; occasionally it will play a rhythm a bit less typical than expected, but this can hardly justify the release as a whole.

Anyway, as you can guess, this is an entirely unnecessary release unless you're simply obsessed enough with underground black metal enough to get anything with that label. The disappointing thing is that while mechanically this band is excellent, I can't find even a seed of unique thought that the band might grow from: Fiend is essentially stillborn and will likely go nowhere. Sad, but not altogether uncommon, and you've probably heard that sort of thing enough already to make this an unnecessary buy.