Demo

Sedation Therapy blends pretty much all of my favorite heavy subgenres incredibly well and adds a tasteful amount of non-heavy influence to boot.
This demo starts with a groovy, blues-y, sludgy bassline that the rest of the intro builds on. It moves on to some hardcore/thrash influenced side-to-side action, while still keeping the main bassline as a root for the riffing. That’s one thing I noticed about this band: they introduce a riff or bassline, and rather than switching up throughout the song, they build the riff/bassline instead. I love consistency like that, and the amount of cool variations they add on the riffs is unmatched in songs I’ve heard outside of stoner metal.

Speaking of that, this band doesn’t exactly fit the mark of death/doom strictly as other bands do; they have a fair amount of sludge/stoner and hardcore elements as well. The bass tone, specifically, is very fuzzy and incredibly reminiscent of bands like Bongzilla or Weedeater. The drums are very warm sounding too, such as a stoner or sludge band, but unlike stoner metal, the beats switch up pretty often. The drumming ranges from thrash beats to polka or two-step beats to the crushing death/doom atmospheric drum grooves signature of the subgenre.

The guitar is also very stoner-esque, serving as the backdrop to the bass rather than the main melodic instrument. There are some tremolo/alternate picked sections and a lone pentatonic solo at the very end of the tape, but other than that, it sticks to the bassline introduced at the start of the song. The one song that strays from that main songwriting formula is the third track, Withered, which starts with a drum groove that’s pretty central to the majority of the song.

For the most part, this demo does everything right, and in a lot of areas, better than most bands. I wish this band would put out more music, because I love this demo and style of death metal.
FFO Crowbar, Autopsy, and Bongzilla. Fav track: Crippling Disbelief