BLACK SCREAMS (DEMO)

"Black Screams" is the debut release by Italian technical/progressive death metal act Sadist. It is a 2 track demo tape with a full playing time of 10:06 minutes. It´s the only release by the band which features original lead vocalist Fabio. The other three members of the band would all perform on the debut album "Above the Light (1993)" ( bassist Andy would take over the lead vocalist role as well as playing the bass on that album).

The music style on the demo is technical/progressive death/thrash metal featuring some pretty aggressive vocals. The progressive elements are the use of acoustic guitars and keyboards which give the sections where those intruments are used a (for the time) pretty original sound. The musicianship is below standard for the genre and especially drummer Peso sounds untight, but there are actually several times during the two tracks where I hear technical playing errors by various members of the band. It´s safe to say that this is a very amaturish performance. The worst example is probably in the middle of the second track on the demo titled "Dreaming Deformities" where there´s a difference in the way the acoustic guitar and the distorted guitar are tuned. That´s just plain disastrous. The least you can do when you record is to tune your instruments.

The sound production is way below standard even for the generally lo-fi demo tape sound production standards of the late eighties- to early nineties extreme metal scene. The guitar is too low in the mix and the bass is way too high in the mix. There´s very little in way of power in this sound. In other words this is a very amaturish sound production.

Well as you might have guessed I´m not too excited about this release and even though there is promise here and there (there are occasionally some relatively interesting guitar parts on the album) the overall impression is that of unstructured chaos. A 1 star (20%) rating is warranted in this case.

This demo was a big hit in the tape trading scene when it was released. This was well before internet with Facebook, filesharing programs and Myspace made tape trading obsolete.

Many years later though, this tape has not survived the test of time. It most of all sounds like German thrash metal with some injections of synths aka Nocturnus. The music sounds untidy and all over the place. The production is not good either. Perfect, it ain't.

The music is pretty bad, but it is a reasonable OK demo tape. It is a demo tape though and Sadist ironed out and massive improved themselves on their first album. But this is a one star release for me, although I have heard far worse demos than this demo.

1 star