Promo 2006

Requiem Laus is unquestionably not something you see every day. Heading from Portugal, the band’s members are far from inexperienced with 12 years of presence in the metal scene. They have 4 releases so far but unfortunately all of them have been demos.


The band plays a mixture of death-black metal together with doom elements all over the place. Great combination, performed as perfect as it can get. The album has relatively mid-tempo tracks with “Reflection of God” being the highest-tempo one. The atmosphere reminds me of Moonspell and My Dying Bride together with some elements of good classical music.


The Demo is full of typical catchy guitar melodies and doom atmospheric sounds. The often complex use of double bass drumming and bass lines adds up to make an overall remarkable feature of the release. What can I say about the vocals? Heavy as hell, simply distinctive and rare to find. The overall songwriting could be a bit simple, but the instruments are so well put together that really makes the demo a winner. The composition can get a bit repetitive at times and may not vary greatly from track to track but it’s not the kind of situation where it bores you. The opposite I must say. I love the way the guitar harmonies express such an emotion, together with the vocal style which is quite parallel to Opeth most of the times.


The production of the Demo is especially clear, although it could be quite better but at the same time a lot worse. There are times where the guitars don’t really distinguish between each other and I think the drums could have been be at a higher volume at times. But, it’s only a Demo.


The first song, “Christ Above”, is heavy as hell starting off with a memorable guitar melody soon accompanied by full instrumentation. “Final Function” is probably the most outstanding piece on this release. The clean intro is really eerie and the drumming is fucking amazing all over the place. I love the fact how the band manages to change the low-tempo parts to fast flowing structures with no problem making the songs absolutely flawless. There is also a short acoustic track, “Maledictis”, which is a good break from the rest of the material although a bit repetitive but overall pleasant to the ears. The last track, “Reflection of God”, starts off with a slow nicely put duel guitar harmony altering quickly to a blast of superb riffing. Worth mentioning is the relatively high-quality artwork done by the bassist Ricardo Fernandes.


All in all, this is a fine release by a top-notch Portuguese melodic band. Everything works out perfect except that the release is quite short, only 5 tracks with a total running time of 19 minutes. Hopefully we will have a full-length album soon enough which we will certainly be looking forward to. This band can easily be considered one of the top in its genre and the potential we have here for a tremendous release is far from little.

Production: 8.5/10
Song writing: 8/10
Band’s Performance: 8/10
Originality: 8.5/10