ILN

This is a hard release to judge, in a certain sense. Nauseant doesn't make much effort to hide who their principal influence is - if nothing else, a song title like "The Emetic (Multicolored Nimbus of Scaly Grace)" gives the game away, and sounds like it could have come right from the 'lich's classic "Nespithe" album. Demilich is a thorny enough proposition to review; only over a lot of time and with the forceful propagandizing of generations of metalheads have they come to be widely recognized as one of metal's greatest and most well-kept treasures. Still, you can't listen to "Nespithe" today without confronting each and every time just how PECULIAR it is. Riffs sound like they are being played backward and sideways at once. Vocals sound less like demonic growls and more like the burpy after-effects of Cthulhu's trip to an interplanetary Taco Bell. The music is heavy but has no particular aggression - rather just a kind of spidery, off-kilter alien-ness which, once experienced, begs to be re-experienced immediately... just so you can try to make heads or tails of it.

But this isn't a review of Demilich or "Nespithe," it's a review of Nauseant and their mystifyingly titled "ILN" (the title on the 7" sleeve seems to be rendered with some heavy black slashes, rather than any kind of conventional typography... unless of course that's just the band communicating with their home planet, and the title isn't on there at all). So what can I say about these Swedes? Well... riffs sounds like they are being played backward and sideways. Vocals sound like burps of an Elder God. Etc. For real, these guys are on a serious Demilich trip - they know the playbook and they're running all the plays. If it got the Patriots in the Super Bowl, surely it'll work for us. Go team!

Frankly, I don't have much of a problem with that. Clone bands are a tricky proposition philosophically - can you truly love or be inspired by a band without their own voice? Perhaps not, but it's easier to appreciate when so few bands sound any-damn-thing like this. I have listened to literally dozens upon dozens of Swedish death metal albums that sound a whole lot like "Left Hand Path" and "Ever Flowing Stream" made a baby that wasn't quite as smart or handsome as its parents, and the bloom comes off the rose just a bit each time I realize that it's just more of the same. But between "Nespithe" and "ILN," how many releases sounded Demilichian? Two? One-half? I may be exaggerating, but not a lot - super-weird avant garde death metal from space and the future is a tiny, TINY sub-genre. Unfortunately.

The real question, once you get over the "they sound just like Demlich" hurdle, is how good are they at doing this? The answer is "not as good as Demilich" (...duh), but pretty good. It can be hard to properly rate songwriting when your riffs sound like the cassette you recorded them on is melting as it plays (that's right, kids: I am an OLD MAN who used to listen to naught but cassette tapes). But my feeling is that Demilich had a magical power that made them able to put these bizarre, Byzantine constructions together in a coherent way that sounded like even if YOU didn't understand them, the space alien squidbeasts they were written for totally would. Nauseant isn't quite there yet. Like a less smart, less handsome squidbeast baby, perhaps. But that's not to dock them too many points - these songs are frequently wonderful and weird, and that's a start.

Where they are hurt a little more is by the production, which does them no favors, and wouldn't do anybody else any favors either. The mixing is strange, heavily favoring the vocals (perhaps because they're kind of quiet and would get lost in the music otherwise). The instruments sound both dry and muffled at once. Put together, it gives you the impression of a home demo effort rather than a finished studio product. It's not terrible, and you can hear what's going on (critical for a band this strange - you shouldn't have to strain to make out those freaky riffs). But it's far from good. To come back to "Nespithe," it was a rather odd-sounding record, but the sound suited the band; the sound of "ILN" is just kind of blah.

Still, don't let that run you off. If you like Demilich and wonder why they never sparked a revolution of weirdness in death metal, these guys (along with fellow Scandinavians Diskord and the US-based, Lovecraftian nightmare Cosmic Atrophy) are necessary listening. This "ILN" is a few degrees off from greatness, but it has me very intrigued to hear what they do next.