Blood Price

One of my greatest pet hates is a band who simply imitates the style of its forebears, contributing neither originality nor refinement to the genre it foists itself upon. Every so often, though, I'll come across a band who forces me to reconfigure the parameters of my frustration, and Weregeld is among them.

If I were asked to define the project's sound from a track or two, I might call it "regressive black metal". Here I use "regressive" as the antonym of "progressive", to point out the project's defining refusal to adopt any of the melody, experimentation or modernity of the genre circa 2019. This is no insult; that the raw and evil sound is unburdened by the tropes of modern black metal affirms Blood Price's place as the spiritual successor to Deathcrush or Cromlech. It lives up to expectations, too; after a short dungeon-synth intro, the demo asserts itself as a monolith of death-inspired black metal marked by savagely simple riffs and remarkably low production values.

Then, something strange happens: closing track "In the Wake of My Force" plays and you, listener, are forced to reconsider the entire demo. On paper, it's a bizarre transition; the song starts out like any other, but less than halfway through degenerates into a strange, no-fi post-industrial soundscape which eventually blends into the background noise of another metal section before it all falls away to reveal a haunting, solitary keyboard that finishes the demo. There really isn't any precedent for this strange, arty left-field turn. Yet, when it happens, it's so smoothly introduced that it doesn't register as surprising at all.

Stranger still, once you've heard it you might begin to hear vestiges of that sound elsewhere on the demo - in the drum pattern of "Doorways Dark and Bright", say, or in the outro section of "Ritual Machine". Things that might've been taken for granted as simple facets of the particular song's composition are forcibly reframed in the context of a thoughtful, brilliantly structured release - one that's simultaneously indebted to the most basic sounds in its genre and keenly aware of the avant-garde leanings of some of the style's most engaging bands.

When I said earlier that I had to "reconfigure the parameters of my frustration", this is what I meant. At first blush, Blood Price seemed little more than an especially good take on one of black metal's earliest iterations. Now, with some time and careful attention, I'm beginning to see that there's much more at play - and, moreover, I'm made to wonder if the simple and "regressive" sound that I ascribed to the demo's early tracks is an artistic statement unto itself, the artist taking their forerunner's techniques but rejecting their conclusions. At any rate, Blood Price is a demo that commands that sort of consideration.