Cauterize the Church Council

So to start things off, the first track is 18 minutes long.  But the weird part is there's only six minutes or so of music.  The last 12 minutes are pure silence.  Well, save the five or so guitar whimpers heard within the first minute of the aforementioned silence.  So I sat there waiting for some kind of hidden track.  Nothing.  Fast forward maybe?  Nope, still nothing.

Well, just to make things clear, this is a remaster of the original 1990 demo.  It was just released last year in 2017.  It's not a very great remaster.  I mean there's 12 minutes of silence on here, "Psycho Damn" has some sputtering in the mix that makes the sound come in and out, and it doesn't sound like it's gotten far from the demo tape it originally was.

But enough of that, how's the music quality?  Pretty decent.  "Cauterize the Church Council" is a pretty mainstream death metal song from the 1990s (go figure).  "Psycho Damn" has some cool riffs in there as well as some cool shredding.  There's this one segment that's pretty technical in the sense that Manticore experiments a bit with time signatures.  "Tales of a Creature" has some fast riffs that are fairly unpredictable.

Manticore's musicianship seems okay, but it's just a demo, so the musicianship can't really be measured very well because everything sounds quite wonky.  The songwriting is good.  It's your typical death metal demo.  I'd say that "Tales of a Creature" does the best job of having a very evil sound as far as death metal goes.  It reminds me of Sinister in their "Cross the Styx" era.

This demo is pretty good.  If I were Manticore, I probably wouldn't make the first track 18 minutes long, and I would maybe try to re-record the songs instead of just trying to make the originals sound better through some kind of audio editing software (which is what it sounds like they did).  Other than that, it's solid death metal demo.

Overall Rating: 79%

Originally written for themetalvoid.wordpress.com