Demo

I found this demo from Noenum on Youtube where it's had a fair few thumbs-up approvals and one commenter expressing the wish that the band release a full-length album. So far that wish hasn't materialised into anything but as long as the musicians haven't yet brought the curtains down on Noenum, we can all still pray or curse hard. Whether Noenum will still be as raw and aggressive as they were in 2002 – that's well over a decade as of this time of review, and nearly a decade and a half too – is anyone's guess. Their split with Vritra in 2009 revealed a powerful and raw style, streamlined and sharp and efficient, but the songs were not very distinct from each other.

The demo gives us a slower and not quite as thunderous version of Noenum but what they lacked in power they made up for in mood and atmosphere. This is an absolutely bleak and despairing recording. While the sound is very lo-fi and parts of it seem blunted, the banshee vocals are icy and spread a sharp chill over the songs. Some of the instrumental music is very well done: the rapid-fire tremolo guitar section near the end of first song "Ritus De Corpus Et Cruor" is a harrowing noise blizzard creature that's close to replacing synth wash background atmosphere. Those guys should have taken a patent out on that sound. The other song "Weltenmacht Oder Wiedergang" starts out just as depressed as the first but there is some good drumming that more often than not is buried in the track beneath the guitars and the screaming.

While the vocals are the best thing here – they're not always shrieking and there are some surprises at the lower end of the vocalist's range - the percussion really should have given the singing a run for its money. If it had been higher up in the mix and more time given over to the drums, the songs would have been lifted out of their downbeat fug and become much more aggressive and menacing. The energy might have even inspired the musicians to do much more on this recording than they have done with just two songs.

Sometimes you wonder how much a band's career could have been different if its music had been just slightly more powerful in one aspect or another.