Lately I haven’t been listening to much of metal (except ocassional track here or there), and I am willing to openly state that raw black metal was never my thing. Therefore to get Behezael’s “Demo 2020” in my headphones was quite a challenging experience.
As it’s turned out, there had been nothing to worry about. True, if you are one of those sound excellence afficionados, you better stay off this one, but for the rest of us, who don’t mind to spend 15 minutes of their life listening to a totally unknown band or project, there’s nothing to lose.
I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised. The demo contains 4 songs titled only by the Roman numerals (therefore, I to IV) with a total playing time of 15:46 and was released on November 22nd, 2020.
The opening of “I” – and basically, the whole demo – has brought me a few decades back and reminded me of such a classic album as Beherit’s debut “The Oath of Black Blood”. The lo-fi sound, the chaotic black metal blasting from my headphones to my ears, I’ve quickly found something to like here.
The rest of the demo is in the same way (which is unsurprising). It’s indeed raw, primitive, lo-fi black metal, which in itself doesn’t bring much originality (how many combinations you can create in 8 notes?), and at some parts it gets a little boring, to be honest. Although in this genre this definitely doesn’t pose a problem. It’s about the artistic expressions and I do believe it.
I have no information whatsoever about the person(s) behind this project, but if interested, you can find the release on Behezael’s Bandcamp:
https://bhzl666.bandcamp.com/releases
