Taking minimalistic to a new level.. – 20%
The_Boss, October 9th, 2008
I heard about Beherit from various places, friends really into black metal exclaiming how they’re one of the greatest, most occult, most underground black metal bands out there. Well, from my first listen off this demo… that’s definitely not true. I have several other releases from Beherit but this is my first listen of them and I must say this is nothing more than low fi primitive, black metal. It’s very low fi, with some of the worst production I’ve ever heard in my entire life.
The production is obviously the greatest detractor for me, I can barely hear the buzz of guitars, the weak pounding of the drums, and the overbearing and slightly annoying vocals. First I’ll go with the drums, whenever he’s blasting away it’s as if he stays on pattern for like 6 seconds, then falls off pattern as if he gets too tired and you can hear him struggling to blast harder and harder as it progresses but then it goes back to how it originally sounded, which is really annoying. The guitars are pretty nice, but the thing is, I can’t even hear them really, it’s so low in the mix. The slower, more doom oriented moments where their are Sabbath like riffs, like the one half way into Ghost of Death, the early blackened thrash riffing style is fairly cool. But then, the drum blasting picks up and makes my mind wander elsewhere. The vocals are, well atrocious. I suppose they work in the way that you want to scare someone, going for the occult and evil sounding style, where it’s really low but at the same time it’s just belched out. It’s sometimes easy to understand him, like on the title track as he rasps, “SEVENTH BLASPHEEEEMMYY!”. Yeah that’s kinda cool, but after a while… I grow tired of trying to hear anything else but the overbearing vocals.
The songs on here really have no structure, other than the halfway decent Ghost of Death that is actually 5 minutes long and progresses into an evil sounding monolith, bludgeoning away with a doomlike trance, then picking up again to being irritating. Also to be mentioned is a pretty cool intro song, Invocation, that has a very “occult” and “evil” sound, something I mentioned before, which is only what I can imagine Beherit are trying to do with this early demo. It also reminds me a bit of something that would be playing in the background of the original Exorcist movie, hearing the far off whispers and evil creeping atmosphere.
Beherit’s first demo isn’t really essential listening, it’s quite annoying actually. There’s one halfway decent song with a neat evil atmosphere and a fairly decent intro song, but seriously the fucking terrible production kills this. It’s as low fi and minimalistic as it gets I suppose, with hardly any decent mixing of anything. Trying to struggle to hear the guitars as well as trying to ignore the vocalist is not something I relish in doing. Hopefully Beherit’s later works are better.
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