The Black Vomit

With this being the first Sarcófago release, I have to say that this demo is musically impressive considering the members' ages and inexperience. Those of you who have listened to I.N.R.I. will know what to expect from this album; fast tremolo-picked power chords, blood-curdling screams, blast beats and lyrics about satan.

There are 2 songs plus an intro which is just wind and ominous noises, I would say that Recrucify is a good intro to set the tone, but it doesn't need to be 2 and a half minutes, and the fact that the longest song on this demo is the noise intro, deducts a few points, if I'm going to be honest. On the other hand, the two tracks on here, The Black Vomit and Satanas are both very catchy. Both have a lot of very fast riffs that are definite indicators of what's to come from the band later on.

The vocals are wretched, the fact that Antichrist was 16 when they recorded this is crazy, his growls are insane and his screams are probably better than they ever were afterwards. The drums are tight and the songs are structured well, although they are short. However, there is plenty of material to be enjoyed in these two songs for any black metal fan, especially if you prefer the first wave like myself.

There are some negative aspects of this demo that to impair the quality slightly though. Firstly, the songs are very simplistic and somewhat juvenile, and despite the adept musicianship, I wish they had developed these songs more to be more dynamic and more memorable, like they would do later on with tracks such as Nightmare and Midnight Queen.

Also, the production is bad, which is to be expected of an 80's underground demo, and it isn't nearly as bad as Sodom's first few demos, for example, but I'm glad they re-recorded these songs later on, but this lack of clear production honestly makes this demo redundant now, as you can listen to updated versions of these songs that have just as much energy, but sound a lot better.

With these things in mind, you may enjoy this demo depending on how much of a dedicated black metal fan you are, but more casual listeners would probably gravitate to the re-recorded versions of the songs. It's the fact that these songs exist in a much better state that makes this demo skippable, in my opinion.