Stigma Diabolicum

I found it very hard to rate this, but I have decided to do so solely based on the listenable quality of this album. After all, listening to a CD is the whole reason for buying one.

As a CD, it's more of an archive CD rather than one you can just put on your stereo and play time after time and is really aimed at the die hard fans of the band that want an audio history. So from that point of view, I'd give it 100% as the tracks are very rare and unique.

From a musical point of view, the best tracks are tracks one and two, hence the 20%. Aerie Descent and Funeral Marches to the Grave are an awesome piece of heavy, murky, downtuned, slow black metal with growled vocals giving it a flavour of doom/death metal. Aerie Descent seems to be missing the pipe organ outro which is found on pretty much all versions of this track. Anyway, the production on these two first tracks is very good quality.

The next six tracks are just guitar and bass tracks called 'Grymyrk' that were sent to Marius Vold and Bard Eithun for rehearsals. A very essential piece of listening if you're into the band, but pretty boring if you're after a toe tapping, headbanging metal track. Also you will hear in these tracks what was to become the guitar sound for 'From the Dark Past' by Mayhem. The sound quality is also a bit distorted too.

The following seven tracks are split between two proper rehearsals with the full band. It's very hard to appreciate the music in these tracks as they're so 'necro' sounding, but again very essential to the fan base.

Overall, it's worth buying simply to fill in the collection. I bought the leather book version which makes it a bit more special. It certainly seems hand made and primitive, but then again, that goes well with the music.