Demo

Before you get too excited by the rating, let me stress that this is a demo, and it sounds like a demo. The only reason I dared give such a high rating to a demo is that this is raw black metal, and in raw black metal, it's okay to sound like a demo. Some full-length "major" releases sound like demo (Darkthrone at their best -- I'm thinking Transilvanian Hunger -- pretty much sound like a demo).

But even so, this release would have received a high rating. Put simply, it is pretty much everything you want raw black metal to be. In the first place, it is only available on cassette tape. In this digital age, this release takes the exclusive form of one of 222 hand-made, hand-numbered cassettes. Mine (number 003) is jet black (I presume they all are, but I can't possibly know), with no writing anywhere on the cassette itself. The sleeve is glossy and black, with a couple good photos, very evocative, but not beyond what anyone with some basic design tools and a Kinko's nearby could produce. One of the things I love so much about this release is that it recalls the DIY spirit that characterized the extreme metal scene years ago, when tapes were traded through an international network of devoted fans. Just looking at this makes me feel like I'm a part of something.

Of course, DIY or not, this music isn't what you would call amateur. Every member of this band is a veteran of several other bands. This being black metal, none of these people, or their various bands or projects, are "famous", and most of their releases are also demos. But what this does mean is that Mord is not a group of plukey-faced fourteen-year-olds recording a cacophonous jam directly onto blank tapes their mom bought them with their older brother's ghetto blaster. These are all experienced black metal musicians who have been living with this music since they were plukey-faced teenagers. They know what they're doing. I used to work with destructSEAN, Anti-human's former bandmate from Misanthropy, and he was no poseur. These guys are steeped in extreme metal.

Now, apart from Holland's Striid, Mord are an American band. The list their home as Denver, Colorado. So I don't know if I should be calling this "kvlt" or "tr00" (and I don't really use that vocabulary anyway), but this music sounds like what you want black metal to be (provided you don't think black metal sounds like Dimmu Borgir). There are two tracks on this demo, but they bleed into each other, creating one long anguished lament. The guitar is dirty and black, too scratchy to be called a drone, united hatred and despair in the way that only black metal can. The experience listener will pick out the effective melodies underlying the black noise. The vocals are a competent and convincing rasp; when, in the second "track", we hear an almost witty sample from The Exorcist, we are initially struck by how much Striid sounds like the possessed Regan (that's not an insult, by the way).

The pace is medium-slow. This isn't what I would call "depressive black metal", but it's more in the vein of middle/late Burzum and the many bands that followed (Judas Iscariot, Nargaroth). "Seeds of Evil" seems a little more energetic, but really these songs sound like two pieces of a whole, and I assume the band intended it to be one long plunge into a night world of anguish.

This will be a worthy companion to all the worst moments in your life. This will piss off everyone you know who likes sissy music. This will alienate everyone who thinks metal has something to do with tight leather pants and leopard-print shirts. This will fit right in with every raw black classic you own.

And added to that you will have a humble physical object that only exists because a group of musicians were dedicated to the music enough to bring it out, even if only to 222 people. Whatever becomes of Mord -- and we all only this kind of black metal is the least commercial music there is -- you will have a permanent artefact of what they felt, and what they were capable of.