WALL OF THE EYELESS — Through Emptiness (review)

WALL OF THE EYELESS — Through Emptiness album cover Demo · 2011 · Death Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
UMUR
"Through Emptiness" is the debut demo by Swedish/Russian death/doom metal act Wall Of The Eyeless. The 4 track, 24:24 minutes long demo was released on the 31st of December 2011. It´s available in both digital and physical form from the band´s Bandcamp page.

The music on the demo is death/doom metal with a progressive edge. The progressive element is mostly because of the developing song structures and the light/dark effect of distorted parts and mellower acoustic guitar parts. Sounds like the description of Opeth right? But that´s actually pretty far from the truth as Wall Of The Eyeless have their own sound.

Bearing in mind the fact that the two guys in the band (SL (electric & acoustic guitars, bass and vocals) and Simon (drums)), have only played together for about a month before recording the 4 tracks on the 24:24 minutes long demo, there are some pretty strong musicianship on display. The drumming by Simon is solid and at times adventurous and SL delivers some really convincing growling vocals, a few clean shoegaze type vocals, skilled guitar playing and pretty good bass playing too.

Out of the 4 tracks on the demo I think the first three tracks "The Hands" (nice thrashy riffing on this one), "Do We Belong Here?" and "Wall of the Eyeless" (which features a riff that reminds me of an old Iron Maiden riff) are the most well composed and memorable songs while the closing track "The Rain Song" seems more fragmented to my ears and as a consequence not as memorable. The band are generally good at making transitions between sections work but there are a couple of places where the transitions are slightly awkward. I have no worrites though as exactly that issue is usually something that is solved with more composing experience.

The sound production is raw and pretty lo-fi but all details are audible and it´s obvious that Wall Of The Eyeless are two young guys loaded with great ideas for their songs. It´s always hard to give justice to a demo recording with a rating system that is primarily designed for studio releases backed up by labels, but for what it´s worth I think a 3 - 3.5 star (65%) rating is deserved for an intriguing and promising demo. According to the band they are currently working on recording music in a "real" studio, so it´ll be exciting to see what they can produce the next time around.
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