INFERNAL BATTLES

Infernal Battles is the debut studio album from French experimental/ avant garde black metal act DeathSpell Omega. Or should I say half studio album because out of the eight tracks that this album consists of the last four are taken directly from the Disciples of the Ultimate Void (1999) demo tape. They are unedited and appear on Infernal Battles just like they did on the demo. This of course means that you´ll only get four new songs if you already have the demo. It´s not that likely though as the Disciples of the Ultimate Void demo was only released in 66 copies. So I guess it´s a good way to become familiar with the demo tracks as well. Infernal Battles was initially only released on LP limited to 200 hand-numbered copies but has since then ( in 2003) been re-released by the Northern Heritage label on CD.

The music is simple old school black metal with aggressive raspy vocals. The songs don´t differ much from each other but the general quality in the compositions is pretty high for the genre. The album does come of as a bit of a low-fi product though (and probably on purpose as it is custom for many bands in the genre) as the sound quality differs greatly from the first four tracks to the last four demo tracks. The first four tracks has a pretty good sound quality even though the sound changes even between these four tracks. The last four tracks sound like a bad live bootleg recording done in a rehearsal room somewhere. A re-recording of those four tracks with a better sound quality would have done a lot for my overall view on Infernal Battles.

The musicianship is very good. This is not your no good pimpled teenage act who has painted themselves with corpsepaint, lit a lot of candles, collected some skulls and painted a pentragram on the wall of their rehearsal room. These guys can actually play.

The style of music that DeathSpell Omega play on Infernal Battles is not a style of music that I normally enjoy much and I can´t say that this album changes my view on that. On top of my personal feelings for the music there´s also the fact that this is a very incoherent album in terms of sound quality and those two elements together means that this is a 2 star album. Only recommended to fans of old school black metal.