Review Summary: A surprisingly proficient first effort, making up for the lack of quantity through sheer quality.
Devouring Star is a one man extreme metal band from Finland that I was turned onto my a mutual friend who’s never put me wrong before, having introduced me to fantastic bands such as Ne Obliviscaris, Caladan Brood and SepticFlesh in the past. All that’s been released so far is a 2 track demo that came out in December, but this project has garnered a significant amount of attention for a group of this nature already so I was inclined to check it out. I was not disappointed.
The demo starts off menacingly enough in “Chaos Omega” (a name perhaps giving a nod to Deathspell Omega who are a rather obvious influence on this band’s sound) with dissonant riffs and the evil sounding vocals that you would typically associate with black metal bands of this style. This isn’t just balls to the wall, bog standard black metal though. There is a lot of progression and technicality in the music, far more than you would expect from someone making only his first release. The drums are kept at a fairly standard manic pace but the guitars have plenty of variation to keep your attention firmly on the music, and the vocals have a raw, violent and rasping quality to them which sound genuinely angry and have some real force behind them, which is something you won’t always find in black metal bands these days, where singers are often too focussed on sounding “evil” to have any real meaning behind what they’re saying.
Second track “Todestrieb” is just as chaotic as “Chaos Omega” but contains more dynamic shifts and at times almost sludgy moments in it. Dissonance is still the name of the game here but the rage feels much more focussed than on the previous track, with time allowed for grooves to slip in to the music and more melodic moments to blend into the violence that surrounds this demo. “Todestrieb” is probably the better of the two tracks in this respect. While it is not easy to pull out a full review on just two tracks it should also be noted that for a demo, the music is very well produced, at least, for this style of music where raw production values will only aid the violence that is intended to be represented in the songs. A more polished production is probably what we’ll hear in future releases but when you’re making dissonant and aggressive music like this there is always a risk that having production that’s
too polished may end up pacifying the sound, so one will hope that’s not what we see next time around.
Overall this is a fantastic first release and really does deserve a higher rating if not for the fact that it’s only two songs clocking in at just under 12 minutes, and just leaves you wanting more. It’s certainly worth checking out if you’re interested in Scandinavian extreme metal or UGBM.
