Review Summary: Hidden gem.
Hessian Crucible was one of the first bands I got really into when, after quite a long time, I turned back to metal music. I discovered this gem on Soundcloud, where back in the days I was searching for new albums to please my endless urge for digging up more and more forgotten records.
"Search until we die" - as you can hear in the song
The Lost Vikings by Dethklok, which still stands as my motto.
Morbidity, still the band's one and only release, really fired up my imagination back then, and I love it just as much as I loved on my first listen. Old-school (melodic) death metal is still very close to me, even though my interest mostly turned towards black metal and numerous ambient genres. Actually this is pretty strange feeling to rewrite this review, knowing how much I changed as I became a more active user on the site... Whatever.
This demo, despite its very short runtime (3 songs, 19 minutes alltogether), is still a rather strong release, mostly due to the great variety and the
catchiness of the songs presented here. Furthermore, the three musicians behind this project really put lots of effort making this release: just for example, productionwise speaking this demo has a surprisingly clean and mature sound. The recording quality, the mixing and mastering is easily in the same leauge with, many studio albums by well-known death metal bands - and that's quite impressive at the very least. Personally I think the demo's absolute pinnacle and the most memorable track is
Shame Spiral, a 9 minutes long, super heavy and enjoyable jam. Exciting tempo changes, chugging riffs, clean passages and menacing solos can be heard just in this one song, fairly representing (at least) the guitarist's talent. The other songs are pretty exciting as well, for example in
The Stoning some stoner metal influences can be heard, while
Hellblast shows some similarities to black metal.
I still love listening to metal demos, because even though their usually pretty short length
(yes, I'm looking at you Paysage d'Hiver), they can offer just as memorable riffs and enjoyment as many other full length releases.
