Apopantos Kakodaimonos

-The only 'good' thing here is the band's music-

Just a quick sniff could show Goat Emperor's foulness: a warning that this recording has got the evil eye hovering about it and is infested with escaped abominations. Their dirty sound as a black-death band brings out some paced moments that will stalk and stride by your senses in a concentrated presentation, and then the band also has their own moments of clamor and uproar. The group is ready to take you on in either direction with heavy induced rhythms, or a seeping blasphemous ideology that curses the day humans were born and light showed its blinding face.

This is a hell of a recording, though with a dungeon of a production. Its depravity roams shadowed ravines and gullies, presenting some zigs and zags through varying paces. The band switches from leisurely walks to jogs and sprints. Pulling them out in a rising and falling momentum like a giant slowly stamping his massive feet to some winged monstrosity speeding right through—either experience being just as terrifying when it happens. Overall, there are more medium paced sections I have to say, so when the blasts or pick-up parts ensue it is something to grab your attention. This recording emits some due-south heat, instead of warming by the fireside, you'll be clutching at your scorched side and might end up missing some eyebrows in the process if the fender guard wasn't up. This is a candidate to bring your spirits down and bring your tail between your legs. Due to a sound that is dense and thick, swamped with a grainy recording quality that seems to bring about a helping hand to aid its dark plunder. That greedy form of darkness that steals your innocence from some keen subtleties as if being let in like the Big Bad Wolf in the Three Little Pigs story and showing its true fangs.

Goat Emperor is cunning with some guitar sections that service the band due to their recallable nature. Most of them show up in their medium or slower pacing. The faster sections seem only there to invoke panic or possibly give minor strokes to the feeble hearted. The band is familiar with the thick to the high of strings, even using a slight case of melody during a few parts that might seem a surprise for the genre. Though they still pull out some sludgy strums and then venture to some more intricate rhythms that require all four fingers to make a thrusting appearance; each of these factions seem to be blended together into their own symbiotic relationship: the giver and taker. On the intro and during a short interlude portion in the last track this has some clean guitar using more reverbed sonar than dolphins and bats in their own respectable environments (exaggerated for entertainment). The drums are luckily separated by a few microphones and are audible during blasts even though his snare is of the bassy variety. The vocals have a decent amount of effects to swallow, drown, and deaden the atmosphere. It gives it an illusion of an auditorium even for the lower recording standards. He mostly uses a deeper growl with some screaming outbursts to some harsh and vulgar extensions as well. Even the last track has some change of setting and I feel is still matched with the other songs as their homage and remembrance of death-thrash with the words "thrash" actually being used before a pick-up part like this was still the adventurous mid-80s. Though the song does switch back into their own particular form of 'mid-moodiness' without the bludgeoning of riffs.

The band isn't on the top tier of being true inventors or even the most accessible and polished sounding to please as many people as possible, though the strength of this demo is that they do throw out a number of gradual and unexpected turns. For the type of music, the mood also feels sufficient due to the musicians themselves giving it personality and also its residued sound giving it that much more ambience. A cool feature on this demo is it uses a few interludes between their metal playing: the intro has simplistic clean guitar and kidnapper-voice modification that shows what a demon the singer really is; they include an eerie sample at the end of another track with a clean female vocalist and strings, due to how it was recorded or taken from it sounds far away and moody like a funeral elegy; another song has a solo female vocalist singing in melancholic fashion as the song starts into its own dreary territories. Rio de Janeiro's Goat Emperor, by name, I can imagine seems like some typical comer to the genre from an unknowing person's perspective, but yet again this is '93 when the name "goat" didn't end with an abundance of the 'Semen's and the 'Anus's. This is still at a combination of black and death, like Mystifier was still doing at the time. The progression of the times didn't yet shake everything loose in the world, as would be more commonly known in Norway with that thinner and more melodic style of music that was picking up in black metal. It is a shame that Goat Emperor didn't get a chance to record these tracks into a full length. Because if this was in fact their first demo recording it is definitely a worthy contender for being an initial release. And although it has some minor flaws with the band getting hectic during some blasts and with grainy production that sounds fine as it is but could have been just slightly louder, it makes up for being devotedly wicked sounding and backbreaking with heaviness. (For the next juicy review see Murder Rape)