ILN

Warning: The blatant Demilich clonery presented here may induce nausea... One might even call it a Nauseant!

The compositions on this demo are something you would find in The Putrefying Vessel where Wretched Hymns Whisper (...Somewhere Beneath the Sludge in the Chamber of Nothingness). Rephrased; Demilich's garbage can for riffs. They have the dissonant, polyphonic guitar parts. They have the dark, unsettling leads. They're just not captivating. Try to picture a Salvador Dali painting is all of it's Surrealist glory. Now imagine a replica of it in the dull, insipid style of Adolph Hitler's painting (without the evil). Nauseant does not deliver in the realm of surrealism and otherworldliness that Demilich does so eloquently. Rather than being strange, they are just kind of awkward. The lyrics are a shallow echo of their heir, lacking in creativity and peculiar concepts that H.P Lovecraft might have conjured up if he were having bowel problems. Imagine if Demilich were simply not as twisted; if they had named their album “The Spine” instead of “Nespithe”.

Envision a little cub roaring, meagerly trying to establish itself in the pack by impressing it's larger, more robust tiger counterparts. Or perhaps more appropriately, a little brother trying to impress his older brother with valiant little battle burps, but then prostrating in the colossal magnitude of the elder's ferocious cacophony of belches. These two analogies represent the incommensurate comparison of Kalle Fagerberg and the legendary Antti Boman. The gurgles here are pretty weak, and it's painfully obvious in the mix that the feebleness has been compensated for. This leads me to next point of focus...

Perhaps a satisfactory goal for a Death Metal band would be to evoke feelings of desperate attempt to flail oneself out of a murky pit of mephitic sludge. Well unfortunately, ILD's production value instead arouses the sensation of being covered in mud. Smelly mud. The kind of mud you step in, and worriedly wonder if a dog had pinched a couple turds there, leaving you troubled and uncertain. Kind of like the riffs. It can be rather difficult to hear what's going on. Surprisingly, amongst all this, the double bass pedal segments have impressive clarity, especially for such a raw sound, but the guitar parts can become extremely opaque. Leads will bombard the mix, dominating the rhythm, and the sound of things just melts into together, metamorphosing into unusable waste. It's unfortunate, because there are certainly some amusing things begging to be heard. That is pretty much the sole achievement of this demo; amusement. Nothing more, nothing less. You probably won't get bored, but rather, utterly enthralled in the essence of “mehhhhhh”.

So anyways, I've criticized the hell out of this demo, but it's still getting a 69% from me, because guess what... It's entertaining, and a lot more interesting than most of the rubbish that's put out in the Death Metal scene today. Nauseant at least deserves menial praise, because they are willing to venture into this strange, formidable sect of Death Metal. They just need to wander further into the vast expanse of nothingness!