RIPPIKOULU - MUSTA SEREMONIA (1993)
This band is Finnish. As such, I will not be attempting to write any of their names out, and don't feel like going to town copy pasting on my phone. Nonetheless, this is a delightful death/doom demo! Major bummer this band wasn't more prolific, cause this is, especially for the time, really nasty, brutal stuff. The guitar tone is low, rumbling and massive, just a fat amount of low end for a demo. Totally crushing for the time. It shakes the inside of my skull. The drums are surprisingly high pitched and, compared to the rest of the instrumentation's inhumanity, relatively human. It works well though, cutting through the guitar tone. The vocals are appropriately guttural and grotesque, and the Finnish phonetics are pretty interesting to my anglophone ears.
The band includes a lot of tempo changes. Generally, these are smooth and seemless because the fast riffs maintain eerie, morbid atmosphere introduced by the doomier ones. At its slowest, this band borders on funeral doom, and at its fastest, regular death metal. The riffs sometimes have a chugging death metal quality, or on slower sections will become angular and skeletal. Plenty of blast beats.
Considering the year, and the demo quality (which perhaps even contributes), this is really brutal, heavy stuff, with great atmosphere. It doesn't overstay it's welcome, because, sadly, it's only half an hour long.
I think fans of Disembowelment, or the heavier side of death/doom in general, should go back and check this band out. Sounds like a black hole. A cult release. One of the best of its kind.