Many bands purposefully try to sound “quirky” and “unhinged” and these attempts rarely lead to worthwhile music as they come across as dishonest and attention seeking as they tend to sacrifice quality for the sake of being “different”. Crifotoure Satanarda’s expression of black metal is genuinely bizarre and idiosyncratic yet feels extremely natural. What we have on this two song demo is a Japanese melodic black metal band paying homage to the vikings with the help of what can only be described as a big band jazz orchestra consisting of 8-bit video game sounds.
The first song “Medieval Siege” charges ahead with a surprisingly original black/death riff. The band stick to that riff for quite a while but add in a lot of breaks. For such a raw recording, the musicianship is surprisingly good. The drummer has a wide variety of fills that he shows in the breaks and even during the blast beats he is willing to play around the kit without sacrificing the energy of the song. These breaks and changes in rhythm allow the band to keep repeating the first riff and its variations without ever feeling monotonous. When the need for a riff change occurs, the band always announce it loudly with complete breakdowns in rhythms and harsh tempo shifts. As soon as the momentum runs out, the band bring in the video game orchestra. Starting of calmly with clean guitars before introducing a weird buzzing synth that sounds like a whistle accompanied by the worst immitation of a xylophone ever heard. Shortly after the electric guitars return with all kinds of these weird immitations, from a trombone, to an oboe to a saxophone, everything is here. The vocalist breaks out into off key pseudo operatic chants and yet despite how each individual element sounds bad in isolation, all together it works incredibly well. Sounding absolutely deranged yet simultaneously massive in both scope and execution as if it were Satan’s own battle host marching to battle. Possibly realizing that the grand orchestra they were dreaming off wasn’t possible within their means, the band took that idea and made it something that is completely original and bizarre through sheer will, yet it fits the music perfectly and has oddly never been attempted before by another act. This gives the music a sense of epicness that many bands can only dream of despite access to better tools.
The second song “Off Shore Battle Front” takes these orchestral ideas and pushes them even further as this time they open the song before the guitars fixate on a beautiful series of melodic riffs that are creatively harmonized and are brought in by the band’s crazy rhythmic changes. The song ends with the craziest orchestral passage yet, sounding this time like a jazz band forced to play black metal against their will. Between the band’s highly developed sense of rhythm and the originality in the riff writing department, Crifotoure Satanarda never needed the “jazz band” to stand out as their songwriting was strong enough to stand on its own, the hysterical synths though are the perfect icing on this cake and only enrich this short release. The band would then return a decade later, but with much more proffessionalism that would see them remove everything that made them once great. Demo/Untitled should have been a precursor to a classic but instead will remain another great demo that is viable for multiple listens.
