DEMILICH - 20th Adversary of Emptiness

Categorically speaking, there’s a few different levels of extremity in the world of metal music that listeners are familiar with: There’s bands that are undoubtedly metal in terms of their imagery and execution but safe enough to show your friends, bands that appeal to a bit more of a niche audience because of their unrelenting intensity and more complex presentation (see: Botch, Coalesce, Converge, etc.), and bands you keep to yourself as to not completely separate you from those you know and love. These are bands whose sheer mind-boggling ferocity and cold-sweat inducing unfamiliarity cause them to plummet far beneath the nebulous subgenera of “cult” bands and into far murkier and uncharted territory.

Demilich (pronounced “demi-lick”) easily falls into the later of these categories. Their sole output, 1993’s labyrinthian Nespithe, is an absolutely staggering example of a band of entartete Kunst obsessives crafting both their mission statement and their magnum opus in one fell swoop. In the vast spectrum of death metal, the knotted and seemingly infinitely intricate genre as it already is, Nespithe still stands alone 20 years distanced from its release as a decidedly polarising record that many swear by, others rail against and none have successfully imitated. Now, after a bounty of lackluster reissues in the years since its initial release, Nespithe is finally seeing the 3xLP/2CD deluxe re-release package it so rightly deserves under the fitting banner, 20th Adversary of Emptiness.

What immediately sets 20th Adversary of Emptiness apart from other Nespithe bootlegs and reissues that have graced the free market over the years is its utter magnitude. Right off the bat, the album has received its first proper remastering job since its release and it benefits the mind-blowing complexity and density of the songs immensely with crisper production and far more defined mixing. In addition, 20th Adversary includes literally everything else Demilich ever recorded before and after Nespithe - early demos, unreleased tracks from their (brief) 2006 reunion - as well as brand new revolting album artwork from original Nespithe cover artist Turkka Rantanen and an interview with frontman Antti Boman to round off the package as nothing short of a holy text for anyone interested in Demilich.

Upon first listen (and most likely just about every subsequent listen afterwards), Nespithe is a truly daunting record to tackle. Unlike their Finnish Death Metal peers Convulse and Demigod, who were also rising to notoriety at the time of Nespithe’s release, Demilich’s approach to death metal is rooted far less in low-end battery and more in stomach-churning disorientation. Boman’s vocals, a wild departure from the genre’s norm, sound like demonic burps and belches as opposed to grunts and roars. Coupled with the standard time-signature defying arrangements and linguistically alien song-titles (“The Putrefying Road in the Nineteenth Extremity,” “The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)”), Nespithe remains a beast of its own.

Given the mentioned complexity and intensity of the music, however, what truly makes Nespithe stand out amongst its technical Death Metal peers is how easily its most memorable riffs and jaw-dropping arrangements stand out amongst the fracas. While Nespithe is certainly a record steeped in complexity, its totality is made up of easily recognizable interlocking parts; head-spinning blast parts, suffocating breakdowns, “mosh parts” in the most technically sophisticated sense of the term, etc. Just like the frog-like nature of the vocals, Nespithe has no shortage of moments throughout its runtime that leap out at you and go for the jugular.

There’s certainly the possibility that 20th Adversary will launch Demilich into “cult band” status amongst metal enthusiasts, although it’s hard to imagine that they really give a shit, but regardless of where it propels them the abhorrent beauty of Nespithe will still remain. It’s a disgusting, gorgeously put together mess of an album, and whether this reissue attracts new fans seeking uncharted levels of extremity beyond the dredge of Avenged Sevenfold-es and Five Finger Death Punch-es they face every day or offers lifelong fans something to whet their appetite for new Demilich material, it’s a remarkable package all around. [Svart]
- Alexander Jones

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