There comes to us a release showing us that the old art is not dead. A group of friends gets together in a rehearsal room to put together intricate riffs that carry a narrative. They test the rhythms back to back, a structure emerges that sustains and modulates energy. There is articulation in its diction, as there should be in writing or in speaking. Well-made music grows as a living vine, with heaves and breathing rhythms, that even in the midst of the putrefaction and desolation they are meant to evoke, produce psychic and infectious life, the destiny of which is to lodge itself into your brain. That parasite, which can indeed grow monstrous and insidious, is what the long-time death metal listener knows as pure enjoyment of this music of death.
Temora surprises us with the high fidelity of this recording to the roots of fully formed death metal. A death metal that does not need to play at being something else. An art form that does not need to play pretend games with politics or dysfunctional expressions for the sake of appearing novel or avant-garde.
Let us be crystal clear about Temora’s 2025 demo. The first two tracks form the beginnings of a pure and potent product of death metal of the highest caliber. The third track is also deserving of praise, highly enjoyable, but belongs to an entirely different school of death metal that allows for bluesy syncretism that jars and grates against the aesthetic sensibility, not just the discerning intellect. The fourth track is thrown in to round off the mandated stability of the number four. It is a well-made, somewhat unsure track that straddles the line between a brand of Scandinavian-influenced North American death metal and the strictly Swedish influences predominant in the first two tracks of this same demo.
What is missing in the first two tracks is the ability to take the music to term, to maturation, a sacred grail and one of the paradoxes that allows this genre to remain alive. There is never a perfect or clear-cut way to conclude a death metal track in this fully developed, inherently (and perhaps the only truly) progressive genre. These first two tracks correspondingly feel too short. This feeling of shortness has to do with the momentum generated before the abrupt suspension of the music. The complete work has to be able to take this energy somewhere. In emblematic death metal releases of the past, this is simply done by elongating the tracks up to the five or six-minute mark. How to do this without ruining the track, without destroying its cohesion, is an art in itself and the challenge ahead for Temora.
It matters that the third track here belongs to a different branch because the more you try to be two things at the same time, the less you are either of them. Amalgamation is only triumphant when it succeeds in fusing two influences to the point where neither of them is recognizable in a creation that is entirely new. The more, then, one delves into that definite chosen form, the more that chosen form grows in the permutations and power of expression endemic to its own ground. From that ground comes what we would term the good.
We would be remiss not to point everyone involved in the direction of Repulsion’s Horrified for a studied foundation, At the Gates’ Gardens of Grief for a detailed look at the power of creative possibilities within the tight container of death metal proper. You cannot go wrong here, and what speaks to the listener as well as the musician comes from a cohesion of intellect, gut, and whole body excitation.
We take note of the high musical quality of what Temora does, even in these last two tracks, which lack the sought-after cohesion and pointedness of intent. There are riffs and sequences that carry the tune, that instill rhythmic life into the listener. We nevertheless exhort these young musicians to look up to their highest possible realization, now that they have come this far. To this reviewer’s ancient ears, this is the most promising release of the year, insofar as it presages the possibility of growth and refinement where the roots of the art were cut short in the past by misplaced interest in so-called musicianship by falling into the jazz and blues trap, or selling out to arena/stadium music sensibilities.
Tags: 2025 demo, czechia, death metal, temora
