Demoncy
Demoncy - Faustian Dawn/Within the Sylvan Realms of Frost (2002)Demoncy - Joined in Darkness (1999)
Demoncy - Empire of the Fallen Angel (2003)
Demoncy - Enthroned is the Night (2012)
Production: Demo or early garage album sound.
Review: Although inspired by the 1990s Norse wave of black metal, early Demoncy crafts a voice of its own through an apocalyptic sensation of nothingness constructed of aggressive primal riffing. These two albums, one a collection of demo tracks and the other an ambitious first offering that recapitulates many of the demo songs, are evenly divided between an early black/death sound reminiscent of Havohej, Beherit and Incantation in a blender, and a second-wave melodic black metal sound inspired by second-wave black metal like Graveland and Gorgoroth.
Tracklist:
Faustian Dawn
1. Whispers of Undesired Destinies (2:52)
2. Winter Bliss (3:50)
3. Satanic Psalms (7:16)
4. Denial of the Holy Paradise (3:18)
5. Hidden Path to the Forest Beyond (2:11)
6. Full Moon Twilight (3:42)
7. Departure of the Dismal (3:12)
8. Ascension of a Star Long Since Fallen (4:40)
9. The Darkbringer (3:23)
10. The Eternal Winter Shall Never Fade (4:21)
11. Knighthood of the Moonlit Realm (5:22)
12. Commencement of the Dark Crusades (6:42)
13. In Winter's Ancient Slumber (7:12)
14. The Final Battle For Our Once Glorious Midgard (7:08)
16. Abysmal Shores of the Dark Lands Beyond the Sun (7:44)
Within the Sylvan Realm of Frost
1. Knighthood of the Moonlit Realm (5:54)
2. Abysmal Shores of the Dark Lands Beyond the Sun (8:21)
3. In Winter's Ancient Slumber (7:12)
4. The Final Battle For Our Once Glorious Midgard (6:34)
5. Within the Sylvan Realms of Frost (9:15)
6. Commencement of the Dark Crusades (7:10)
7. Ascension of a Star Long Since Fallen (4:37)
8. The Darkbringer (3:19)
9. Hypocrisy of the Accursed Heavens (2:30)
10. The Eternal Winter Shall Never Fade (4:50)
11. Ascension of a Star Long Since Fallen (4:47)
12. The Darkbringer (3:38)
13. Rebirth by Moonlight (5:36)
Length: 2:26:33
Within the Sylvan Realms of Frost upholds the sense of alien yet intensely organic conflict that anchors the more martial vein of black metal, creating like the best of that genre woodland settings in which a mystical experience unites details into larger themes that replace the ostensible with the invisible pattern language of reality that we uncover at the end of a long journey of discovery. Songs make verses of riff motives in sequence, then return to a chorus which expands as context introduces more expansive views of previous themes.
Unlike the more detached later works from this band, early Demoncy is melodic and beautiful without losing any of its sere violence, resembling early Emperor in its balance of melodic beauty and ear-savaging primal chromatic rhythm riffs. For sheer spirit and panopoly of invention, this double album shows Demoncy at their most vital, although the tracks that later made it to Joined in Darkness are more mature on that album. As with later Demoncy works, this music pulls back the camera of the individual and views existence instead as a landscape not just of space but of time, in which the only forces that exist are primal emptiness and a struggle for significance in an ashen process of destruction.
Review: Demoncy layer mirrored modalities in oppositional structure to form tone and rhythm into a distinctive riff shapes, creating an architecture of patterns which sculpts a spatial dynamic in which phrases rush at the listener with a sense of foreboding detachment and sinister purpose. This poetry of interlocking phrases creates a matrix of possibilities converge upon a singular mood of emptiness and suspension of belief through its nihilistic narrative much like that of the first albums from Incantation and Havohej.
1. Hymn to the Ancients (1:21)
2. Impure Blessings (Dark Angel of the Four Wings) (3:58)
3. Demoncy (3:29)
4. Joined in Darkness (5:02)
5. Winter Bliss (4:16)
6. Hypocrisy of the Accursed Heavens (3:15)
7. Spawn of the Ancient Summoning (4:03)
8. Hidden Path to the Forest Beyond (2:24)
9. (Angel of Dark Shadows) Goddess of the Dark (4:22)
10. The Dawn of Eternal Damnation (4:23)
11. Embraced by the Shadows (0:21)
Length: 36:56
Guitar instrumentation is precise, with no solo work, using precisvely carved counterpoint patterns to create a sense of the inexorable. Rising and roaring, limblike riffs engage in combat through this motif-driven and through-composed column of sound. The harsh whisper dry throat vocals that carry these songs in rhythm and timbre reverberate behind a churning tempo of unobtrusively backgrounded digital drums. As a loud recording with plenty of variation in its dynamic output, Joined in Darkness moves like an organic progression of growth in decay and carefully orchestrates its atmosphere for a consistent conceptual descent into dark moods.
As racing tremelo is used an ambience of resonant sound is created but is here purely manipulated in the evolution of riffs as a skeletal outline of structure, eschewing the harmony and melody that might obstruct its singular purpose. Immersive in texture and loudness, the conflict of discovering order in obscurity that drives these songs creates a vast spectre which emerges in order to destroy and vanish in its own ashes, with the lingering reminder of its arbitrary but inevitable return.
Production: Clean, polished metal rolling across concrete.
Review: Bands known for acerbic nihilistic chromatic music get wrongly accused of selling out or failing if they attempt melodic music. On Empire of the Fallen Angel, Demoncy make an album every bit as good as their first but not as hard-hitting as Joined in Darkness, with two complications: first, and of no consequence, it is a Sacramentum/Graveland melodic metal hybrid, and second, of greater consequence, the vocals are monotonous in delivery and timbre and do not fit the music.
Tracklist:
1. Enchanted Woods of Forgotten Lore (1:05)
2. The Obsidian Age of Ice (3:47)
3. Empire of the Fallen Angel (3:21)
4. Night Song (Apocalyptic Dawn) (3:22)
5. Sepulchral Whispers (4:22)
6. Shadows of the Moon (The Winter Solstice) (4:42)
7. My Kingdom Enshrouded In Necromantical Fog (4:19)
8. Warmarch of the Black Hordes (3:28)
9. The Ode to Eternal Darkness (6:36)
Length: 35:02
Back when this music was written, the initial Norse trend had been replaced by second-wave bands like Graveland and Dissection in the public eye. These bands tried to fuse the fast blistering sound of early black metal with the archly romantic sweeping melodies of bands like Emperor and Immortal, building on the work of bands like Impaled Nazarene who made orotund but simplified, savage melodic black metal. Demoncy adapted, and suffered from writing music to be released four years later, and so caught up with the evolution of the genre in this lengthy work but missed the trend that would recognize how strong this album is.
Most melodies resemble patterns used by either Graveland up until 1997, or Sacramentum from their first full-length, fusing a gentle sense of mathematical complement in melodic beauty with a surging forward motion and grounding in abrupt shifts of chromatic intervals or fifths. The resulting music sounds sustaining through its energy tinged with echoing sounds of the past. While the vocals overlaying it are processed and on-beat and uniform in rhythm, giving people little to grasp to differentiate this otherwise quality album from those around it, that minor detail changes little. This powerful album was overlooked and should be rediscovered.
Production: Subterranean and organic, with unearthly distortion that captures oddball harmonics.
Review: If metal has a holy grail, it is to mix the vicious id of gnarled chromatic riffing with the order and beauty of melody. Merging the two, Demoncy compile a career worth of powerful riffs into this album reminiscent of early Unleashed crossed with later Profanatica.
Recent black metal tried to be "innovative" by combining known "successful" styles, but Demoncy instead tackles the harder task of crafting the new from a well-known aesthetic with depth to plumb. Riffs resemble the first Demoncy album in which a melodic Swedish influence dominates, and a carefully intermeshed dose of the powerful pure rhythm riffing that made 1999's Joined in Darkness such a legend. Taking a nod from newer Profanatica, complex single string riffs mingle with the marching legions of power chords.
Tracklist:
1. Midnight Veil (1:53)
2. Winds of Plague (3:11)
3. Opening the Lunar Bloodgate (4:30)
4. Unclean Spirits (4:10 )
5. Into the Twilight Mists (3:56)
6. The Temple of Shadows (2:42)
7. Enthroned Is the Night (4:06)
8. The Arcane Aristocracy (4:46)
9. Black Vengeance of the Ancient Hordes (3:45)
10. City of Millennia (5:03)
11. Nocturne (2:41 )
Length: 40:43
Often songs use the raw riffs to establish a shape and then uncurl from within it a melody that both highlights riff contours and shows a pathway between the starting and ending points of its motion. Song structures project a duality in which most of what we hear is careful staging of verse and chorus, but as we listen into each song, the interstitial material reveals itself as pivotal. Over this the vocals drape, loud but distorted and reverbed into a sound more like a high wind rushing from the cold night.
Percussion seems to be of a digital variety or designed to emulate it, but while more active than previous Demoncy recordings does not obliterate the real lead instrument here, which is the rhythm guitar. As in minimalist bands like Ildjarn, or the undeniable ancestor of this album on the first Incantation album, guitar dominates all else and narrates a dark adventure. Riffs flow together so that as only as each completes do we see its importance in the newly expanded context its addition created. This powerful and sublime album bypasses the failed new school to advance old school primal black metal art to new heights.