Lucifer's Name Be Prayed

A black metal demo tape from 1998 with a red cover, the logo absorbed into the indiscernible artwork and the title in Engrish, matching the color scheme. There's a black-and-blue photo of some goofy dudes in corpsepaint trying to look serious on their end, but absolutely not coming across as such. The band hails from Indonesia and this is their only release. Is that a burning tire on the cover?

The band meets most of the basic aesthetic conventions of black metal, from the look to the lyrics, but the riffs are somewhat muted. The guitar work, hardly even riffing, seems to be limited to a very small range of muted chords out of limited capability rather than intent. It's not laughably incompetent, they have at least the technical skills of a Nirvana cover band, but they are thoroughly unimpressive. The vocals are half-hearted, overloud croaks that punctuate the unfortunate background of aimlessly chugging guitar riffing. I don't get it. They really don't get it.

This isn't really black/death metal, it's more like beginner-level garage rock leaning towards bad death metal with a furious storm of headbanging nods towards the aesthetics of black metal. They achieve a few of the conventions of basic death metal but completely fail to do anything interesting with the music. It's odd these days to hear failed attempts at black metal that don't even attempt a mix of blast beats and tremolo riffing.