Unchain the Wolf

This band hail from Romania and play raw black metal. The lyrics on this album represent their anti-religous views. This is their first demo and it is limited to 500 copies.

After a rather sinister intro that contains a lot of distorted guitars and vocals the band launches off their assault of unholy black metal. The guitars are the dominant sound in this release. There is some variation in the guitar sound and it is pretty melodic and fast paced throughout. However after a while I tend to get kind of bored with their sound as each track just sounds eerily familiar to the previous tracks. The vocals are integrated neatly into the songs for the most part and are pretty rough but remain fairly comprehendible. One thing that is kind of an annoyance for me is the way in which the band will often push the guitars into the background when the vocals come in to play. I find the riffs they use on the guitars during this period are simply boring. Listening to this record, I get the sense that the band is trying to vary the sound by using a few different techniques such as suddenly dropping the pace in the guitars and then picking it up again, but this just doesn’t seam to catch my interest that much. Also they attempt to vary the record with their third track, which is a short acoustic guitar solo, but alas this does not work, as it sounds to short and dull. Production wise I would say it is fairly good, though I would prefer a slightly crisper guitar sound.

Overall I would say that this is a solid demo and well worth listening to, but the vocals need more variety and the same applies to the sounds of their instruments. The whole disc is only 18minutes long though, which I find suitable as it would get very dull if it was much longer.

Standout tracks include “Forgetting the Origins,” and “Stigmata”