Seul

In the hope of trying to find more variety and actually substantial material from Satanicum Tenebrae, Seul is admittedly a much improved effort compared to its predecessor. The opening track is brooding and sets the tone nicely, with some layered chanting that turns into screams. This might be deceiving as it indicates an ambient, shitty minimalist release like the previous demo, but the second track immediately defies this, with some great clean guitar that floats over the atmosphere, giving a nice developed touch to the music. Although it is repetitive, the title track acts as a good representation of the aspects of this demo compressed into a short length.

As for the demo as a whole, there are still times when the exclusivity of the ambient effects and the vocals feels dull and doesn't add anything of interest to the music, but the improvement of the core of the music here is directly linked to the change in vocal style that sounds much improved. Instead of the (badly) horrid croak that wails over the synths, there is some interesting use of layers here with chanting and proper screams that are quite fluent throughout the album. The synths themselves are pretty good, because even though they are highly minimalistic and lack variation, they feel truly evil even with some dissonance in the harmonies which make the ambience feel unhinged.

The reason I still don't think this is a great release is because of the plain lack of content, with a very dry composition spread out through the demo that consists mainly of two sonorities; neither of which really progress in any way and fail to give solid substance to the songs. What this demo does do right is create a sense of obscurity and depressiveness, which was probably the aim anyway instead of quality music, but even bearing that in mind, the outro feels out of place with a rather jovial synth that ends with the sound of water fading out. Either way, this is a much better demo from Satanicum Tenebrae which shows pretty good minimalistic ideas with some flaws.