Nespithe

Demilich is definitely a pioneer for many things in and outside of metal, singlehandedly creating dissonant death metal, eldritch gutturals that have yet to be replicated naturally (pitch-shifted goregrind vocals do not count), and song titles as long as Japanese light novels. Demilich is truly a vanguard in the avant-garde music scene. This sole album of theirs is what really kickstarted all the weird experimentation we see later for avant-garde death metal, along with Gorguts (Gorguts has more influence, but this one came out first).

Going into this record, one thing you will immediately notice is the wonky and weird songwriting that sounds uncanny but still sounds oddly catchy. It is as if the musicians behind this are aliens coming from the cosmos who heard a Morbid Angel record and decided to take a stab at their own approach on an OSDM album. They are Finnish, so that is as close as you can get to actual aliens. While the sounds here are atonal, noisy, and disorienting, they are still pretty catchy and groovy in their own right, like any other OSDM record from the same era. You can actually headbang to this on the first listen, assuming you know where and how to listen for the grooves. But that is not the end of their eccentricities; another distinct feature of the band's sound is the abyssal, eldritch gutturals that sound like a cross between a frog and a man whose vocal cords are composed of nothing but black holes. It really gave the album its alien and cosmic sound that resembles something Lovecraftian, but there aren't any Lovecraftian lyrics to be found here. The cover art is pretty gnarly for its time, but Cannibal Corpse had some album covers that were way more disturbing and striking than this. It is very unique, however.

The guitars here are the leading sound of this album; they are the source of all the dissonance we can hear here. They sound oddly similar to OSDM riffs, but just uncanny enough to sound off to your regular death metal fan. The drums are actually the most normal instrument here, and while it has its weird moments like hitting cymbals at random, it does serve a greater purpose by instilling unease into the listener, continuously ruining their internal 4/4 rhythm that they have grown accustomed to. The bass is pretty buried; you know it's there, but beyond that, you cannot distinguish the basslines from the guitars, and you will never tell if the basslines are also doing their own atonal ways or just your bog standard basslines that could be ripped from another song and we will be none the wiser.

Production-wise, this album is very polished, unlike other Finnish death metal albums from the early 90s. Instead of being full of fuzz and reverb, it decides to go for an approach that is similar to modern technical death metal like Beyond Creation or Archspire but without the distinguishable basslines. It reminds me of Heartwork in this regard; it was very ahead of its time and was criticised by metalheads back then for forgoing the gritty, reverb-drenched sound, but this album can already creep out listeners by its sheer dissonance, so no one really cared about the polished production.

I usually don't talk about song titles and lyrics, but this is one of those times that I would talk about them. Notice those song titles that are as long as a light novel title? Yeah, those are just a summary of the lyrics. "When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water" is a sentence that makes no sense, but once you look at the lyrics, you realise that the title is exactly what happened in the lyrics: the sun and water are at war, and the sun decides to say fuck it and evaporate all the water into itself, thus drinking it. It feels like a spoiler in Metal Gear and JoJo; if you get spoiled, it will sound like nonsense until you reach the part, and then the spoiler suddenly makes a lot of sense and you are left wondering why you did not connect the dots earlier. It sounds wacky, but it successfully further enforces this image of the album as an eldritch abomination created by aliens to mimic an OSDM record in their own ways.

This album might be the most accessible avant-garde death metal album (a very huge statement given its weirdness, but considering bands like Portal and Gorguts are in this genre, it is justified), befitting its status as the first of its kind to be released. It might take a few attempts to get into, but once you do, it is a treasure trove of catchy riffs, alien songwriting, and just general Finnish weirdness that can only be found in that region. As much as I want to give praise to Gorguts' Obscura, they end up prioritising too much dissonance and avant-garde songwriting, while this album hits the balance between weird/wonky, and being enjoyable/groovy.

Where's the next album, Demilich?

Highlights: When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water, Inherited Bowel Levitation -- Reduced Without Any Effort, And You'll Remain… (In Pieces Of Nothingness), The Planet That Once Used To Absorb Flesh In Order To Achieve Divinity And Immortality (Suffocated To The Flesh That It Desired…)

See what I mean about long titles that are as long as Japanese light novel titles?

A while back, I reviewed Gorguts's third album "Obscura", and it wasn't the best record to say the least. I've since kind of warmed up to it a little, but then again, it's still not the first album I'd want to listen to. On the other hand, there is an album that came out earlier than Obscura that I think executes that technical/avant-garde sound better, and that would be in Demilich's "Nespithe". Despite only releasing one full-length album, Nespithe has gained a cult following for its unprecedented composition that still remains fascinatingly wild to this day.

Beginning with the instrumentals, we start off with the track "When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water", and this is where the madness already starts. The guitars have a deep and heavy sound in it, and its riffs are very technical, complex, and tight in composition, as well as sprinkling in some avant-garde structures in it with some odd riffing. The drumming is also as complex, as its beat patterns vary from fast blastbeats to some complex drumming that only adds to the complexity of the structure. Even the bass is technical, as its bass play follows a similar technical composition to the riffs and somehow manages to fill in a stable foundation to it all. Now, Obscura did a similar style, but the instrumentals on that album felt weak as they were too avant-garde and disorganized to be enjoyed. Here, however, there is more rigidness in the structure, and the riffing is more stronger with its tight technical composition, so the guitars still play a nice riff. And this isn't just limited to the first track either. Tracks like "The Echo (Replacement)" and "And You'll Remain... (In Pieces in Nothingness)" are especially strong with its technical death metal style, but it also does have some nice avant-garde riffs that make the atmosphere more mysterious and eerie. While the instrumentals might take some by surprise, the marvel of the technical riffs and drums leaves you satisfied.

We then move on to the vocals, which is where things get even stranger. Antti Boman has done the vocals for the band since day one, and the vocal performance he gives on this album might be his strangest yet. His voice sounds very deep, and utilizes a lot of gurgles with some growls thrown in the mix, making him sound very gurgled and sick. While some consider his vocals a bit of a turn off, I think they work really well in this album, particularly in the track "(Within) The Chamber of Whispering Eyes". Here, Antti's vocals flow well with the fast and technical guitars and drums, and his gurgles only further enhance the mixed and wild atmosphere of the track. Antti's sick personality helps influence the ugly and distorted mix of the instrumentals, as well as enhance the avant-garde elements of it all.

Even the lyrics are really good. The lyrical themes of Nespithe can get abstract at times, but the songwriting still remains strong nonetheless. Take the lyrics to the ninth track for example (no I'm not typing out the track name as it's ridiculously long), where this verse quotes:

A silent forsaken planet
It's pores full of flesh
It once used to be alive
Now dead, condemned to loneliness

This verse talks about a planet that actually was alive and living, but is now dead. It's very cryptic and abstract in nature, seeing how the planet is an actual living thing, but the way the lyrics are written makes it all grand and immersive, as if you're feeling the dead body of the planet. Furthermore, these lyrics are very fitting to the instrumentals and vocals, as the more avant-garde leaning moments further adds to the oddness of the story, and the gurgled vocals also adds in some pain in the planet's life. These stories may feel weird, but they are still told well and are fitting to the album.

With all of the in mind, it's easy to see why I consider this to be a stronger version of Obscura. The technical and avant-garde instrumentals are mixed well and feel more well established than on Obscura, as well as having some unique and scary vocals and some chilling tales about the cryptics and abstract horror. While the band is still technically active, there hasn't been any new releases besides an EP that came out last year. Nevertheless, if you want to hear Obscura done right, then I highly recommend you check this album out.

When I first submitted this review it got rejected, because it didn't necessarily follow the guidelines. Instead of writing the review from start to finish AGAIN, as some poeple might do that, I just decided to fix my mistakes. I also listened to this album again, to make sure I am right aboout what I write so I can make sure this review doesn't get rejected again. But here it goes.

Why did this get so many positive reviews? Where's the brilliance exactly? I geniunely don't get it. This is just average old school death metal. I mean, yes, the riffs are pretty unique but do those riffs really keep up the music here? Not really. Let me explain to you why I, personally, think that this album is overrated and what makes this rather lackluster.

Let's start with the music itself. This is avant-garde death metal. What's the rest like? The same thing. Start to finish. Every song has a similar structure with other songs and all the riffs sound very similar to eachother. The drums play the same stuff most of the time, and the vocals... GOD those vocals are infruriating. We'll get to those in a minute.

The guitars. Very anorexic and thin sounding, but also ambient at the same time. The riffs consist of lots of complex melodies, a few pinch harmonics at times, and tendencies to be ominous, but also lacks of heaviness. The guitars try too hard at being complex and ominous, but they fail because of their tone. All riffs sound very similar with eachother as well. People say that these riffs have very interesting ideas, perhaps you're right, but they just aren't executed properly. They aren't terrible by any means, they just get suffocated by other instruments, and they are mediocre by themselves, and that cuases the guitars to be forgettable. There's a few solos here and there, but they don't add to the music as much as I would've hoped they would. The drummer Mikko actually does a decent job. He is probably the most memorable part of the album. He does blastbeats, he grooves, but unfortunately he doesn't know where to put correct beats most of the time. Most of the time the drums are there just for the rhythm, and since they're there just for the sake of being there, they don't go together with the riffs underneath and they ruin the structures of the songs.

The bass is clean, but doesn't do anything special, asides from adding some low-end. The bass supports whatever the guitars play, but it just becomes forgettable. Sometimes the bass gets exposed, but that doesn't add much to the music.

Now the vocals. Man, they should've hired a vocalist. The vocals provided by Antti Boman are fucking terrible. It's literally the type of vocals that everybody who don't listen to death metal thinks death metal vocalists sound like. Antii sounds like he's literally burping. And it sounds terrible, and it just doesn't fit the music. If they decided to do more of Suffocation, Broken Hope, or Carcass style death metal then maybe the vocals would've fit better, but this way it just sounds out of place, and this is mostly why this album didn't get a higher rating from me. I believe if they got a different vocalist, who wasn't drunk and decided to step in front of a microphone, then the music would've been more listenable. The lyrics are pretty esoteric and abstract but they are fine for what they are, so I can rightfully ignore whatever they are or what they are about, beacuse they don't bother me.

The production is okay, you can hear everything clearly, but the production also doesn't enhance the music. It kind of just does it's job, and sounds like an average 90s death metal production. The only good song that I actually liked from start to finish was the 5th track entitled "The Putrefying Road in the Nineteenth Extremity". Other than that the songs weren't much any good and I forgot how they went anyway.

I took my time to listen to this album again, this time I was even more bored. I mean, during the 5th track I did get something going with my head, but most of the time I was on the edge of falling asleep. So what can I say about this? This album is overrated and also pretty boring. I geniuenly don't get the hype behind this. This album is pretty mediocre and I don't know who to reccomend it to besides die-hard fans of atmospheric experimental death metal. As Petrus_Steele already pointed out, this doesn't sound any different from most death metal, the experimental death metal at least, and I rightfully agree with that. Not because the riffs aren't different, but because the music itself is not unique, or at least the composition. So yeah, if you like finnish death metal then you might dig this, but personally I don't see myself listening to this ever again. Terrible vocals, poor execution, mediocre production, and monotony plague this album.

Underrated? I beg to differ.

The Finnish death metal scene, though full of bands to a lesser extent than the American one, is one of my favorites in terms of extreme music, and Demilich is one of its best representatives. And here is the first glitch, because if one of these supposedly "best representatives" has only a series of demos and one full album, it's...hmm...it gives a rather peculiar look at such a scene. It should be noted, that this is not the issue here. Often these groups simply broke up at the period of demos/eps (Agonized, Abhorrence, Depravity, Rippikoulu, Pestigore), after their debut (Demigod, Purtenance, Funebre, those discussed), drastically changed their style (Amorphis, Xysma, Convulse, Sentenced, Disgrace) or functioned somewhere in the back (Adramelech), and if by some miracles they returned after years of non-existence, their activity was mainly based on playing concerts rather than releasing new music (like Antti Boman's band) or if they already released something, it was not particularly exciting (again, Convulse, Demigod). In short, there was a lack of happiness and understanding.

It does not change the fact that Finnish death metal is one of the most intriguing and unusual in this underground trend. The best example of this are "Nespithe" and the development of this quartet since the demos - the leap is really huge. The music of Demilich has become much more complicated, the atmosphere is even more gloomy, and the melodies are downright atonal (today it would be said that they were avant-garde). Interestingly, the production sphere is much more human, i.e. much more powerful and clearer than on the demos (you can easily enjoy the bass tracks), while maintaining a fleshy and "lively" sound. So, enough to consider "Nespithe" as a fully rational progression compared to the demos (especially when you put together both versions of "Raped Embalmbed Beauty Sleep").

Ultimately confirmation - songs. Well, absolutely all of them are massacred with a multitude of ultra-interesting ideas, each of them is full of technical nuances (sometimes even something like jazzing), and at the same time it's difficult to say that this sound was totally overdone, too complicated or distant from the death metal core. In this case I will only mention "The Echo (Replacement)", "And You'll Remain... (In Pieces Of Nothingness)", "The Planet That Once Used To Absorb Flesh In Order To Achieve Divinity And Immortality (Suffocated To The Flesh That It Desired...)" and "Erecshyrinol", because there are as many as 11 tracks (and the titles, as you can see, are extremely amazing), but none of them is worse than the other. They are all shocking with Antti's awesome "frog" growl, morbid technique and a perfect underground atmosphere. So it's a pity that such an outstanding album was appreciated relatively late and that it put an end to the band for many years.

Originally on: https://subiektywnymetal.blogspot.com/2021/12/demilich-nespithe-1993.html

Thinking back to the very first time I heard this album back in 1994 the first thing that obviously stuck out were the legendary inhuman frog burps of vocalist Antti Boman. But there was something even deeper brewing in Finland.

Back in 1993 death metal was starting to become stagnant due to hundreds of clones trying to mimic a style that bands like Morbid Angel and Suffocation had perfected. In walks Demilich, a band who dared to do something different while still raising the flag of underground death metal. Coming off the strength of several well received demos Demilich released their now legendary debut album Nespithe. An 11 track masterpiece full of the mixture of crushing low tuned death metal, technical proficiency and just all out weirdness. Imagine early 90's Grave trying to play Frank Zappa covers. The song titles are a wonderful collection of tongue twisting extended essays like "The Planet That Once Used to Absorb Flesh in Order to Achieve Divinity and Immortality (Suffocated to the Flesh That It Desired...)" and "The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)".

At first glance the album starts off with the incredible "When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water" which also happens to be my personal favorite off the album. Opening killer riffs as well as drumming and a very audible bassline pull you in on a journey into obscurity and just gets weirder and weirder as the album progresses, and that is a good thing. The rest of the songs are consistent in their pummeling attack but balanced with occasional bizarre grooves and odd temp changes. The drumming is precise and calculated, schooled in death metal 101 yet original and not afraid to stray from the norm. Guitars are heavy and low tuned with great harmonies which sometimes are in unison but other times in battle with each other. The bass is audible, clanky but with a little dirt and does it's job of providing a solid foundation for the guitars. Finally the vocals, what else needs to be said about the legendary performance by Mr. Boman. The vocals are as deep as they come and sound both like the most guttural belch humanly or inhumanly possible and the most laid back whisper both vomited into a wind tunnel vortex.

The production on this album contributes to Nespithe's atmospheric labyrinths. Weird time signatures and serpentine riffs are readily available on a canvas of cavernous production which makes the listener feel like they are the only attendee at an exclusive concert in a vast underground cave. Songs like the "The Echo (Replacement)" start off frantic and throw you a curve by immediately shifting into a head bobbing mid tempo groove amid several layered guitar tracks and then goes back to frantic upbeat riffing again. Other songs like "Raped Embalmed Beauty Sleep" have several time changes and come off sounding like a more extreme Voivod for lack of a better term. There is not a bad song in the bunch and the album actually comes across as one entire piece instead of 11 different songs as they all seem to meld together as a huge mutated psychedelic creature known as Nespithe. As if there wasn't enough mystery and avant-garde weirdness on Nespithe the album's lyrics are written in a strange code for the listener to decipher. The icing on the Nespithe cake of weirdness.

Almost three decades later this album has stood the test of time and is highly regarded as an underground death metal classic as it should.

"Nespithe" is a superb, challenging, one-of-a-kind record. In recent years it has emerged from obscurity to become an unlikely cult classic. Demilich aren’t exactly a ‘household name' in metal circles, but they are better known than they were when they made this record. Their path to (relative) prominence began at the turn of the millennium, a few years after they broke up. The turning point was the band’s decision to put their entire discography on their website for free. This may not seem significant these days, but underground music was harder to find back then, and the old school death metal revival was in its infancy. The band’s generosity meant that a new generation of underground death metal wannabees (like myself) became well versed in Demilich overnight. This trickled down over the years, renewing the scene’s interest in their obscure, ancient, bizarre music.

This album sounds unlike every other death metal record ever made. It sometimes feels like it arrived from another planet. It is easy to forget the context from which this oddity arose. As with most death metal debut albums from the early nineties, "Nespithe" is rooted in the band's demo history. Five of the songs here came from the "...Somewhere Inside the Bowels of Endlessness..." demo, three additional songs came from "The Echo", and one was reworked from "The Four Instructive Tales...". There are only two songs exclusive to this album, opener "When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water" and "The Planet That Once Used to Absorb Flesh...". These two are the most impressive, evolved songs of the band’s career. They hint that Demilich had yet to reach the summit of their progressive powers.

“Nespithe” is the definitive Demilich recording. Those demos were intriguing and unique, but some of the band’s talent was lost in the lo-fi sound. Unlike their Finnish contemporaries (e.g., Demigod, Disgrace, Abhorrence), Demilich did not suit a ‘fuzz’ production; the kind of sonic wall that Finnish death metal was famous for. Demilich were never a 'jagged' band. They tended to disorientate the listener with their composition and execution, rather than by using angular riffs and obvious time-changes. Such a subtle approach needed a subtle production. “Nespithe” has that production. It sounds smooth. The instruments blend together to fit the band’s rounded, globular aesthetic. The bass and drums are immense, providing heaviness to balance the relative lack of distortion in the guitar.

The most significant innovation is less immediately obvious; “Nespithe” was the moment when death metal realised it could float. Demilich detached themselves from the traditional anchor points of the genre; chunky, chuggy, thrashing riffs and aggression. Instead, Demilich blurred their riffs seamlessly into their melodies and vice versa. There are no sharp transitions here. Nothing ever returns to a ‘home’ riff or vocal hook. Songs move at a consistent pace, neither fast nor slow. Riffs bounce in and out of the space created by the bass. The overall effect is of weightlessness, complemented by the nonchalant, incomprehensible vocals (imagine a combination of Snake from Voivod and Bill Steer).

The overall effect of this album is oppressive, dreamlike and profound. “Nespithe” borrows from the past without resembling it. Voivod and Carcass must have been big influences, as was (presumably) the earliest At the Gates material. Yet this album feels like nothing that came before it. Demilich absorbed their influences into the expanding alien brain concept they had created. The final result was something that might be described as 'post death metal', a genre classification that doesn’t exist (to my knowledge). As time passes, newer bands borrow from Demilich, but I can't think of any that capture the spirit of this record. Without doubt, this is a necessity for anyone with the faintest interest in the outer realms of extreme metal.

Demilich’s sole album is a masterpiece that blends proficient technical oddity with ridiculous camp, wrapped between some slimy, gummy, earworm that was way ahead of everyone's ears. They were so far ahead that they didn’t bother to make a sequel. Despite of the album’s mythological status of it being too weird and inaccessible for the normal ear, I would gleefully say the opposite. This isn’t like Molested’s Blod Draum, early Suffocation, or the many bands in the future that rely on dissonance and unfriendly but technical songwriting that is blanketed with wall of sound whose sole purpose is to simply pummel the listener with dissonance (Portal, Chthe’ilist, etc). Demilich somehow took their obsession of unorthodox scales and rhythms and manage to craft some of the most fun and oddly accessible songs in metal. I guess the only bands that gave off similar feelings to them are Immolation and the Mexican death metal band Denial.

On paper, the band is basically this unholy blend of the solid brick heaviness and growls of Bolt Thrower with Atheist’s blend of traditional thrash/death metal with jazz fusion. Compared to Meshuggah, another technical “groovy” death metal band that blend Fear Factory’s muscular “Stop and go” riffs and hardcore-like attitude a with mix of bouncy rhythms, jazzy chords and lead work. The songs that Boman and his mates composed still feel indebted to traditional death metal in their usage of tremolo picking, standard power chords and the Slayer-esque lead work. Their implementation of atonal licks and riffs uses a lot string skipping which help in their really off sounding grooves (And not a lot of dissonance, as compared to the other bands associated with Demilich). Also, despite what others say, I really like the production of the album since it’s drenched in the right amount reverb and distortion that the album retains a sense of clarity within the madness. It really works in trying to achieve this maddeningly fun but outrageously alien atmosphere.

Of course, we can’t talk about Demilich without talking about Antti Boman’s vocals. They were very low for death metal at the time, with the closest one could find in bands like the aforementioned Bolt Thrower, Barney era Napalm Death and that Skeleton of God’s demo. I do at times imagine the album with some more traditional growls and/or screeches, it still will be a fantastic and alien album but the characteristic bizarreness is lessened. It’s not even comical anymore; it just fits in the world of Nespithe. Bomans’s lower vocal fry is blended with relaxed vocal passages, this Boman sound inhumanly powerful while not feeling angry or blood hungry like most death metal vocalists. It does however give off this vibe of outer worldly power. The vocal performance also fits the lyrics of the album since lyrically they read like bizarre and violent observations of an unknown world. This can be best heard in songs like "Inherited Bowel Levitation - Reduced Without Any Effort", “The Cry” or "And You'll Remain... (In Pieces in Nothingness)" where Antti robotically describes some of the brutal and bizarre ways a human can die. "The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)" is a personal favorite of mine where Antti Boman gives us the briefing in eradicating all believers whether they are Satanists or Christians while being carried with this catchy verse riff that may or may not give you Nu-Metal vibes. There's also the instrumental "Erecshyrinol" which has possibly the most unexpectedly epic riff in metal. (I wont give you the timestamp, you will know what i'm talking about when you listen to it)

Speaking of Nu-Metal, I could see a lot of mallcore kids gelling with this, the album might even give them a feeling of “Kewlness” just knowing this “Super Obscure” death metal album.

Praised by many as the best finnish death metal album of all time, Demilich’s first and only album Nespithe is an album like no other. Everything about the album is shrouded in obscurity: The winding, atonal guitar melodies, the unpredictable song structures, the ridiculously deep burpy vocals of Antti Boman, the disturbing yet intriguing album cover, the nonsensical song names and lyrics, it’s all made to look, sound and feel as alien as possible, yet it all makes sense. Everything comes together beautifully to create this atmospheric and otherworldly soundscape that many bands have since taken inspiration of.

Making an entire albums worth of atonal riffs is no easy feat but Antti Boman seems to have a great ear for what works and what doesn’t. It’s almost like Antti brought a couple new scales with him from whatever higher dimension he came from. All the riffs just work despite their foreign sound and they rarely sound the same. And it’s not just the melodies that stand out because of their uniqueness, the riffs are also rhythmically different. They are full of twists and turns and generally tend to wind around for a while. Combine this with the atonality I mentioned earlier and you’ve got yourself a bunch of really weird yet satisfying riffs.

The drums complement these interesting riffs with spontaneous tempo changes and weird comps. Cymbals are hit almost randomly and honestly sometimes I can't even comprehend what the bass drums are doing. This style of drumming may sound quite odd, but it does actually work quite well with the rest of the instrumentation.

Yet the weirdest part of this album are the absurd vocals of Antti Boman. The extremely burpy and echoey vocals of Boman are like nothing I've ever heard. I thought John Gallagher of Dying Fetus had the burpiest vocals of all. God was I wrong. I must admit the vocals were quite off-putting during the first listen, but now I just find them funny and honestly somewhat fitting to the album. I mean everything else about this album is already so bizarre so fuck it, right?

I feel like every aspiring metal musician should listen to this album. Antti Boman himself has said that he knew absolutely nothing about theory and had very few influences when writing the material for this album. This album is a great example of what can be achieved with next to no knowledge of music theory or even basic riffing templates. Obviously learning music theory is recommended as not everyone are quite as gifted as musicians as Mr. Boman is.

While this album may be a bit hard to get into at first, there are many pleasant surprises to be found within these twisted, truly alien songs. This album is a classic for a reason. Even if tech death isn't your thing, listen to this album, because it will open your eyes to what metal can be at its weirdest.

Demilich is one of those very experimental and unorthodox death metal bands that came out of nowhere, yet attracted the vast majority of fans of the genre with ease, and unexpectedly so. Another surprising aspect is the location in which the band originates from. Back in the day, you’d find death metal bands rising mostly from Florida and New York states, England, and Sweden, respectively. This time, it’s Finland. Excluding bands like Atheist, Cynic, Nocturnus and others that were recognizable and are experimental and technical, most bands were/are pretty much traditional and evolved from the thrash metal influence to perfect the genre; blast beats, death growls, fast guitar-picking and bass. Then you had these freaks aboard the train, offering quite the heavy music.

I think A standard was the tuning the band used, which is insane for something that took place in the early 90s, when the majority of bands played between B standard to D standard. Comprehensible but slow, burping death growls, while still using traditional death metal standards. The lyrical themes are the obscure part that made this band significant, not just the experimental music. Nespithe (which is really “The Spine” or “The Penis”) contains unusual, metaphorical (in some way), and ridiculous lyrics, whether they’re merely humorous (as much as the abominations in the album cover look) or veering away from the general themes of death metal. The vocals helped shape the lyrical themes to give you this kind of uncomfortable feeling and obscure listen. I guess it worked. I didn’t find the music to be competitively superior or distraught in terms of the amount of heaviness and song structures the band produced. It was just heavy and strong music, yet standard. While the instruments’ tuning is very low to sound crushing, this crushing heaviness possessed nothing mind-blowing on a technical scale, nothing challenging or new. The drums did their part, but nothing too impressive or unheard of.

I’d say my favorite part about this record, besides the lyrics, vocals and tuning, is the length of the tracks’ titles, with the excessive use of brackets. The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed), The Putrefying Road in the Nineteenth Extremity (...Somewhere Inside the Bowels of Endlessness...), and the longest-titled song, The Planet That Once Used to Absorb Flesh in Order to Achieve Divinity and Immortality (Suffocated to the Flesh That It Desired...) - like what the fuck do they even mean?! They’re awesome to read. I can always appreciate reading long-ass titles…

Despite the success and importance this record has and how it shaped most subgenres of death metal, it wasn’t that of a great listen. I’m all about obscure and experimental music, like the aforementioned three bands above. And I appreciate songs like Inherited Rowel Levitation - Reduced Without Any Effort, The Echo (Replacement), And You’ll Remain... (In Pieces in Nothingness), and the instrumental track Erecshyrinol (the joke being “No Lyrics Here” - and that the vocalist threw in some of his feral-like ugly noises and growls) that offered such groove in the music. It matches the soundtrack of freaking DOOM. But Demilich didn’t have my undivided attention. The music sounds traditional and simple, as if this is just another traditional death metal band.

The production is also seemingly bad, in comparison of the compilation of demos and “rarities” Em9t2ness of Van2s1ing / V34ish6ng 0f Emptiness, which although sounds more like djent, it sounded better. All the tracks except When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water and the longest-titled song are the only two original tracks, while the band reintroduced the demos into this record, which I think the demo versions beat the newer versions. It’s a shame that they didn't focus on writing original material for their debut. It’s the same with Suffocation’s Effigy of the Forgotten and Incantation’s Onwards to Golgotha, though they’re far greater records. If I were to listen to this in 1993, then yeah, maybe I’d praise it 100%. Over the years, however, better experimental death metal bands emerged, and to me Demilich doesn’t sound any different from most to some extent.

While Florida's Cynic was mixing its own cocktail of death metal, jazz fusion, and prog, over in Finland, Demilich was twisting death metal convention in its own bizarre and unprecedented way. No less unusual at the time, Demilich's sole full-length is more insular in its innovations, holding off on spicing up its sound with influences from other genres and instead examining the core elements of death metal and bending them into a new shape. Nespithe is a writhing mess of death metal turned upside down and inside out and twisted into a non-Euclidean shape that, even 26 years later, remains unique.

Demilich's music could be thought of as death metal based on some sort of music theory developed by organisms that live on another planet and have an entirely different way of thinking about time signatures and tonality. Everything here is so unconventional and so determined to shuffle forward in ways that defy earthly musical conventions and common sense itself that there isn't much predating the album one can compare it to. Obituary with Captain Beefheart's band handling the songwriting? Yeah, I guess that gets you close to understanding what this sounds like.

Despite having the sort of downtuned riffing and guttural vocals death metal requires, Demilich doesn't depend on speed or brute force, instead building a thick, hellish atmosphere out of strange riffs and basslines that are perpetually out of step with each other, their time signatures weaving in and out in weird, ever-changing ways until they form a knot you can never fully untie. A landscape cluttered with fire, brimstone, tentacles, and weird, multi-limbed monstrosities certainly comes to mind as you wander through these ever-shifting labyrinths of odd, often dissonant progressions that constantly twist away from your attempts to comprehend them. Antti Boman provides the perfect vocal accompaniment to the madness, burping forth his lines like a dying elder god that got sick from gorging on all the collective suffering of humanity. His voice is so low that it's still unclear whether or not he used some sort of voice-altering software to attain his hellish timbre. Even the lyrics are outright bizarre, starting with Lovecraftian horror and going further left field from there.

As chaotic and devoid of sense as everything previously described may sound, all the elements come together to produce an amazing display of technical playing and outside-the-box craftsmanship. Though these songs aren't catchy, despite what some have claimed, Nespithe is a memorable experience that’s immensely enjoyable. Though the band’s template for making discordant death metal has been emulated numerous times by fellow weirdoes like Gorguts and Portal, there’s never been a band that’s one-upped Demilich as far as putting together an experience that’s slippery, dissonant, disorienting, and challenging but still cohesive and enjoyable. For its ability to present a wealth of satisfying songs based on a bonkers approach to music that has no business working as well as it does, Nespithe is an essential listen.

Just imagine yourself in the following situation: you're casually scrolling through YouTube when you see a recommendation for some album called "Nespithe", you look it up beforehand and learn it's by some tech-death dudes from Finland. "Huh" you think "probably your casual tremolo, palm muted death record", but you decide to give it a try. You put the album on and the moment you're done you're clutched in an embrionic position, sucking your thumb and wondering which plane of existence you're in. Yeah, that's Demilich in a nutshell. If the album cover isn't already a good summary of what the band is about then let me tell you more about this bunch of devillish composers.

First, the guitar sound is... bad. It's mostly what stopped this album from reaching a score of at least 93-94. I mean, come on, it's one thing having a lo-fi production, but really? Did it have to be so... egh, I can't even describe what's wrong with it, it seems like it lacks distortion or the amp used was overall shit. Anyways, while the sound is somewhat irritating the riffwriting is off this Earth. I mean, yeah, you've got Gorguts and their dissonant stuff, but it is not as atmospheric as this here. And what atmosphere does the album create, you might ask? Imagine that bunch of zombies from the cover or whatever the fuck they are marching and obliterating everything in their way, their screams heard all over the place with the Grim Reaper overseeing the whole thing from the back, it's safe to say this is the type of music that would be playing. Tremolo is used only when it fits the moment, the rest of the riffs are technical fretting on the low and middle strings so it's a steady deviation from the norms of traditional DM. The bass can at least be heard, and I mean it's really loud, and there are a few interesting parts from the instrument, but I expected a bit more. And, boy oh boy, the drums here! Sure, they are slightly inaudible, but not enough to ruin them as is the case with the guitar tone. The guy behind the kit shows us that with the least amount of technicality (because, frankly, I've heard way more intricate drumming) you can serve the music 100%. In other words, this is not the best percussion one can hear in an album, but it is exactly what is needed. Last but not least, the vocals. You play the record for the first time, expecting to hear a bear and-WHAT THE FUCK, ARE THOSE BURPS?! Yep, the guy sounds like he downed a whole case of beers immediately before delivering this one of a kind performance. Never have I heard such a thing and I doubt I ever will, but you should really check for yourself what I mean.

So, the biggest complaint I have to make is towards the producer of the album, who more or less ruined the whole thing. If this album had a slightly beefier sound, with the drums higher in the mix and the vocals centered more expertly Nespithe would've been very close to the 96-97% mark for me. But as terrible as it might be it is not unlistenable (or whatever the proper adjective is). Besides that, there isn't really much to point out when it comes to the negatives. The songs, while obviously constructed with the same theme in mind, are not repetitive and all feature something distinctive. The musicians are professionals who apparently grew tired of the bland and talentless death metal scene that emerged in the early 90's, so they took matters into their own hands, sat down and built (and I deliberately use that word) the most intricate, dissonant and virtually impossible to listen to record. Additionally, the lyrics and song titles add to the eerie feeling of the "thing".

While Gorguts delve into the very depths of chaos Demilich focus primarily on utter destructive power. I mean, look again at that album cover, look at the fucker on the far left, he looks like a Terminator. This is alien colonisation music, this is what will be playing when some Zen-like creatures invade our reality and we are left hopeless and screaming. Demilich somehow summarised what terror is in a single album, actually, in a single song, each of these tracks alone is enough to send chills down your spine. So get yourself a diaper and some joint pain medication, because you will be headbanging and shitting yourself at the same time as long as this record is on.

Nespithe is an anomaly in the world of death metal. It plays with what's technical, surreal, slimy, and pioneers an extremely alien sounding style of death metal with this album being a loner in style and among everything this band has created. It did things that few other death metal bands ever did and it did them in such a way that there is really no better way to describe this than pure deranged filth, and I mean that in the nicest way possible since it makes for a truly interesting listening experience. Death metal novices would do good to try and truly broaden their horizons with this thing, by that I mean gaze into the writhing, slimy maw of the abyss and try to understand it's disgusting, yet profound mutterings. Yeah, this is one of those kinds of albums that thrives off of how strange it is, but weirdness is not all that's on offer. Beneath all of the slime and confusion is a solid tech death album that dishes out some pretty intoxicating and impressive instrumentation that plays on the strengths of such techniques while avoiding sounding like a mess. In fact, it feels planned out in a way that probably shouldn't be comprehended by mere humans.

The music presented on here is unorthodox not just by the standards of metal, but of music itself. These riffs are spiny and jagged with the guitar rhythms themselves being very snaking and rumbly with a heavy emphasis put on the low end of the music to emphasize the sliminess and ugliness of their music to its fullest extent. They are insidious, but also at the same time their insanity carries a lot of skill. The insanity on here is calculated and deliberate, but never contrived. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find something resembling normality on this album as every aspect of it has been twisted, bent, and warped in some way that makes it sound intriguing, and otherworldly terrifying, but also gives this album it's signature momentum of snaking, rhythmic insanity. I already mentioned the guitars, but so much else is altered to fit the demented outlook of this album. The drums, courtesy of Mikko Virnes, change patterns frequently, use unusual patterns, and usually fire on all cylinders. The vocals, courtesy of Antti Boman, sound like the belching of some frog-like abomination from deep within the bowels of the earth. Even the lyrics and song titles are deranged with them being long and fixating on grotesque images of flesh, gore, and outer space. The album title itself is an anagram of "the spine" with the letters mixed around in a certain pattern. This sort of cryptic complexity plays a lot into this album's, and this band's musical identity.

In spite of all the sickened insanity, there is an element of cohesion to this with how much the music's progressions serve to maximize the murkiness of this album's sound. The coiling guitars, manic drums, and burped vocals all twist around each other to maximize the strange and disgusting nature they each possess while keeping the rhythms complex, yet coherent. Whether these guys are blasting, building, squealing out a solo, or dishing out a rare mosh groove, Demilich always manage to sound like their music is creeping and spiking along in manic patterns that accent this album's level of Lovecraftian insanity. However, it all holds together in a way that's not just technically impressive, but also manages to maintain a bit of swing to the music with the rhythms never devolving into formless clatter, always keeping their monstrous forms intact and coherent.

Nespithe is one of those albums that is unique simply for the fact that it tread ground no-one else was willing to tread and in doing so set the bar for surreal, and mind-bending death metal with almost nobody else touching that bar for a long time. This is a thoroughly alien piece of technical mania and it pushes itself with riffs that pulsate and writhe in rhythm that perfectly reflects the atmosphere while the solos and melodies are warped and complex in a way that terrifies while holding the melody firm to whatever bent patterns emerge. This is the kind of album that takes a while to get used to and it wouldn't surprise me if this was initially off-putting to some people, but the music on hand really holds together well despite the insanity and mixes in a way that comes off as natural. The mission of this album is to be as slimy, as grotesque, and as otherworldly as possible and it succeeds at doing so while integrating that with this band's penchant for rhythms that are unorthodox and hard to pull off even with an expert's grasp of music. It really is something worth getting into and it grows on you like some freakish Lovecraftian blob parasite feasting on your essence (or some other crazy shit like that). The pulsating guitar rushes may seem just strange at first, but they have their own way of being infectious over time and it lures you in to see just how off the wall this thing really is. Nespithe is the kind of album that is unique, but also very good, and very mind-bending with how it presents itself in a way that few would dare to imitate. Granted the album is a little hard to get into and kind of disorienting, but it does that so in a way that best shows off their skills and revels the most in their murky world of belching beasts and flesh-eating planets.

I've been piddling around with a blank copy of this review for a long while, unable to really write down anything because reviewing something so fucking good is so damn hard. This album is one of a kind. There are no other bands that have come close to creating something at all similar to what these fine folks in Finland have done, especially on their first full length. (full disclosure, I use the phrase "completely fucking weird" repeatedly throughout this review, and I stand by the repetition. There is no other phrase to describe this band.)

I suppose otherworldly best describes these riffs, but even then I feel that isn't quite the right way to phrase it. The riffs are extremely technical, but not in the "these techniques are so crazy" way that bands today seem to do with endless sweep picking. This is complex in a way that the actual techniques are simple, and the riffs aren't all that fast, but the way the riffs are constructed makes it so damn hard to play, and incredibly strange to hear, all the while not sounding too much like technical wankery and keeping an interesting variance to them.

The vocals are also one thing of note. They are completely fucking weird. There has not been one band I have heard (and I've heard quite a few) that does these guttural but somewhat understandable growls...? Burps? Who the hell knows. It works, and it kicks ass.

This is an album so original and well crafted, I literally can't find anything bad about it, nothing even mediocre or above average. Everything is just a solid performance, with well thought out compositions, riffs, beats, and yes, even the lyrics are good (and completely fucking weird.) This album deserves nothing less than 100% in my book, because it is nothing less than perfect.

You know, in that alternate universe in which time runs backwards, this album would be the world's most derided as having stolen every single idea bands had after 1993. You can think of whatever band in the world in the late 1990s or 2000s having a really great idea, and Demilich will have said "Hah, we'll take your idea and do it in 1993!" Basically, this album is the culmination of all cool ideas in metal from all the years after this album was released, but Demilich did them before they became cool ideas in metal as a whole.

The problem is that from a neutral viewpoint, amazing quality aside, it isn't very easy to sell this album to those not familiar with it. That is because describing the surface elements doesn't leave a very appealing mix in theory. For example, I will certainly never win an award for being the world's biggest fan of technical death metal, so if you came to me praising this amazing technical death metal album you think I should hear, I'd probably ignore you. Moreover, there certainly is no love lost between myself and death metal that infuses a strong sense of melody, so if you praised the great melodies on this album, hell would freeze over before you got me even remotely interested. Then to top things off you may begin to talk to about vocals that sound like a cross between belching and frog vocalisations, and you can be sure to have given me a mental image of an album I will certainly never give the time of day.

It is a bit of an odd thing that I not only checked this album out, but actually gave it enough listens to fully grasp the genius behind it, because I am usually impervious to the fierce word of mouth propaganda that led to my doing so in the end. The right amount of praise, with the right amount of thought put behind it, by the right people, usually not enough for me to budge, but! Combined with the level of intelligence and creativity seen in the songtitles, it was enough for an interest to be piqued. And just as tenacious as the concerns voiced in the second paragraph were prior to my subsequent indulgence, as swiftly they were washed away by the sheer quality of this album's writing and performance.

Nothing could be a greater mistake than avoiding what is being presented on this record based on what its surface elements look like on paper. It is not simply a question of the album being greater than the sum of its parts. That is an expression more adequately used for something the parts of which would have some appeal of themselves and being put together to something of high quality. In the case of the album I am reviewing, it would not only be an understatement, but the entire approach of that type of thinking would be fallacious. Because simply put, it's not a matter of a couple of good riffs strung up into something great. It's far more radical than that. The parts on this album, and that's the beauty of it, are actually anything but good or appealing by themselves. Take any riff, any melody, any bass line, any drum part, any frog belch, by itself it's actually quite awful. What Demilich does is to interweave these awful parts into a radiant piece of art. It's dumbfounding, but that's the power of amazing songwriting.

Both the sheer level of thought behind these arrangements and the keen instinct for their perfect interwoven combinations leave the listener astonished, almost in disbelief over how something so bizarre and unsettling can be made into something so grand. Every note seems to flow into the next as if written in cosmic stone at the beginning of time and discovered by still primitive humans via some bizarre scientific contraption. Every hit on the drumkit alike, and every utterance of vocalisation, it all fits together like a pre-historic puzzle to be solved once humankind has hit the right level of evolution. It all creates a certain aesthetic flow that can only be compared to the beauty of the workings of the universe themselves. It's a work of genius, no less can be said about it.

I realise that it will never be within my writing abilities to properly convey the majesty of this album's songwriting and performance, and that to many it will continue to be a candidate for dismissal based on it supposedly being just anothter faux-"strange" technical death metal album with too much of an emphasis on melody and vocals that to many can't possibly be taken seriously either by the person who performed them or the confused listener wondering what it was they were meant to accomplished. I don't think any of my ramblings in this review will make any difference to those reluctant about giving this album enough listens to fully immerse themselves in it and discover its genius. The fact that this is one of the best recordings in the whole of metal, and possibly music itself, remains.


--- Originally written for http://droneriot.blogspot.com

In a genre defined by its unfettered commitment to extremity, it’s rare for a death metal album to retain its stopping power in the generations following its release. Sure, Scream Bloody Gore and Altars of Madness still earn respect and admiration from contemporary ears (and rightfully so), but they’ve since been trumped in terms of their heaviness and commitment to perversity. A large part of what has made Demilich such an enduring gem is their lack of successor; no artist since has made death metal that sounds quite like them. Even with the twentieth anniversary of its release having occurred earlier this year, Nespithe remains as twisted, puzzling, and frightening as ever. Newcomers may find themselves put off by the unconventional guitarwork and (ahem) distinctive vocals, but there are few metal albums I’ve heard that leave such a lasting impression. Nespithe is death metal for the thinking man, and my only disappointment with the album is that Demilich never chose to make another one.

While most certainly mired within the confines of what we would label as death metal, Demilich took the familiar ingredients of the genre and forged something unmistakably unique with them. Death metal’s trademark aggression is filtered through a labyrinthine network of time signatures and the sort of dissonant harmonies you may expect to mind in modernist classical music. The rhythms ebb and flow with fluidity like a river current, much unlike the straightforward rampage you would expect to hear from a death metal album over twenty years old. Throughout the album, Demilich pays a consistent attention to detail in the shape of the riffs and flow of the composition. Whereas it would be expected even from a left-field band like this one to loosen the reins for a while and offer a taste of simplicity, Demilich doesn’t compromise their sophistication for a second. Even the slower parts of the song structures are complex and rich with detail.

On paper, the guitarwork on Nespithe might be sound like a description of jazz music before anything else, although you wouldn’t think it for a second while listening to music itself. Contrary to most metal, the chords seem to follow the lead guitar, as opposed to the other way around. While there’s certainly a proper method at work with these riffs, they sound liberated from conventional scales, pairing notes that wouldn’t normally go together. The guitars weave riffs that jitter and twitch like thoughts inside the mind of a madman. Demilich’s compositions are elevated greatly by a focus on harmony otherwise alien to most death metal. Tapping into the same pool of insight as neoclassical composers Krzysztof Penderecki and Gyorgy Ligeti, the guitar harmonies are unsettling, as if the two melodic lines are pulling in the opposite directions. Harmony is an exercise in music most often used to make a composition more beautiful or ‘pretty’, but the opposite rings true for Demilich’s use of it on Nespithe.

Although the lasting quality of Demilich’s work is large part in thanks to their inventive guitar work, nothing has contributed so much to the album’s reputation as have the now-infamous vocals of Antti Boman. The album booklet itself proudly proclaims that no effects were used to tweak the vocals, which might only be described as ‘cavernous’. It is typical in death metal for the vocalist to rely on aggression and volume to get his point across; Boman goes for something different entirely. Listeners have described his delivery as anything from a low guttural to a controlled burp, and they wouldn’t be wrong either; the man’s vocals are almost indiscernibly low-pitched, and quiet enough to slip right by an inattentive listener. I don’t know if I’ve heard of another extreme metal vocalist (sparing Silencer’s Nattramn) sparking such division in listeners; Boman demonstrates you don’t necessarily need volume to have presence. Although an acquired taste, the belching gutturals are eerie like nothing else. Where other death metal vocalists retain a shred of their humanity, the vocals here don’t sound like they’re being uttered by a human being. It’s no doubt clichéd to say in a metal review, but the gurgling sounds downright Lovecraftian in scope and atmosphere. The vocals are not intended to be the focus of the listener; instead, it adds a thundering resonance beneath the miasmatic riffs, quiet enough so that they never get in the way of the album’s strongest suit. Lacking entirely in dynamic, Boman’s delivery may be something of a one-trick gimmick, but considering that there’s still nothing else quite like it twenty years after the album’s release, the vocals still stand as a boon to the album’s standing and immortality. It’s a shame that some listeners can’t look past Demilich’s vocal choices, because even if Boman’s vocals lack the range of a more conventional masterpiece, they still come secondary to the otherworldly riffs that consume Nespithe.

Demilich enjoy a production style perfectly-fitted for their work. It sounds organic, pleasantly murky, and just crisp enough to showcase the technical finesse of the riffs themselves. The drum production could have done with a little greater dynamic range, but there’s nothing significant to complain about the way Nespithe has been crafted. In particular, the guitar tone never ceases to impress me; it sounds diseased and dark, as if the amplifiers are bellowing from some hellish underworld. When you imagine how difficult it must have been to properly mix vocals as low and subdued as Boman’s into the mix, it’s pretty impressive to hear them coming out so evenly with the rest of the music. Although the sheer alien illegibility of his vocals make the lyrics’ effect on the music negligible at best, Demilich have penned some pretty schizophrenic poetry to match the album’s monstrous atmosphere, and are well-worth checking out. It’s an album marvellously consistent in tone and style, and though Demilich do not stray any bit from their style, there are plenty of riffs that stand out as being memorable, provided the listener is diligent enough to seek them.

It only took one full-length for Demilich to innovate and, in turn, perfect their brand of alien death metal. In a way, it almost bodes well for the band’s cult of legacy that they never graced listeners with a second album. It’s forced listeners to get the most out of this one album, and left Nespithe a truly ‘one-of-a-kind’ experience. The belching bean-burrito burp vocals will turn some listeners off immediate, but to the uneasily swayed, there is richness and sophistication to enjoy here beyond almost anything else the genre has offered.

Since I first became interested in heavy metal in my teen years, I've had the interesting experience of watching certain kinds of music slowly grow on me while some others slowly get shrugged off. In those days, when I was stuck listening to the generic metal that I could find on the shelves at my local Best Buy, I thought that Metallica was the pinnacle of human ingenuity, that Iron Maiden was absurd and was nothing more than opera tracked over hard rock, and that Pantera was the heaviest and nastiest-sounding band of all time. Needless to say, to even be at the point of having an informed opinion of an album such as Nespithe, I have come a long way.

But all that aside, what's the purpose of this little narrative? It's to illustrate a point - to draw a parallel between my discovery of heavy metal and my discovery of this album. The point is to emphasize the mindset that is needed to appreciate a work as bizarre as this. You see, when one is stuck in that Metallica-based frame of mind, it's difficult to appreciate death metal (or black metal, or grindcore, etc...) as music. In all these years of listening to metal, death metal was the genre that took the longest for me to come to enjoy. The reason for this, I think, was that the bands and the albums that were the most readily accessible were also some of the most lackluster. Sure, Cannibal Corpse and Deicide are both exercises in brutality and aggression, but I find it difficult to really be engaged by that style of music. What it would ultimately take for me to garner an interest in death metal was to see the genre from an entirely different perspective.

This work by Demilich seems to play out like the answer key to a sheet of questions, all of those questions asking something akin to "what if we didn't do X?" What if we were heavy without being overly aggressive? What if we played death metal without resorting to brutality? What if we got a schizophrenic to write our lyrics and song titles? What if we had our vocalist belch his parts? ...and so on and so forth. The point is that the resulting album sounds starkly different from the prototypical death metal LP of the day.

Nespithe is mostly moderately-paced, bass-heavy, and freaky. It's sort of like the death metal answer to psychedelic rock. The vocals are years ahead of their time, predating the unending BREEEEEE of brutal death metal and goregrind by the better part of a decade, yet actually remaining (somewhat) intelligible. The tracking for the instruments is also unusual for the time period, with separate guitar and bass tracks playing from individual speakers. The percussion and the vocals are very subdued compared to the guitar and bass. The guitar is heavily downtuned, producing a tone that sounds like a predecessor to sludge metal.

The result of all this odd stuff is a bizarre listening experience which rumbles in the ears instead of roaring, and which confuses instead of terrifying. Nespithe is so drastically different from the common death metal of 1993 that it boggles the mind. The techniques which were the daily bread of the genre's musicians of the day are almost nowhere to be found on this album. The guitars aren't constantly playing tremolo lines. The drums aren't constantly churning out rapid-fire blast beats. In fact, even the double-bass is used somewhat sparingly. The vocals are not barked or roared or growled. They're gurgled.

This album very well may be as far away as one can get from the conventions of death metal and still be called death metal. It's a genre-warping, mind-bending experience. If you can find it in you to sit through it and appreciate its uniqueness, you will be greatly rewarded. It's really a shame that Demilich is no longer around to make more crazy music like this, but then again, that would spoil the novelty of this album, wouldn't it?

This album is a hidden gem and a lost classic. Think back to early Scandinavian extreme metal and one immediately thinks of Sweden - Bathory, Nihilist, Dismember, Entombed and so on; Finland rarely comes into it.

Well this album shatters any myths that it was all about Sweden. This album is the missing link between European and US death metal. Amazing in its ability to fuse grotesquely guttural, heavy, loose death metal with psychedelic and avante garde technical metal. The mix is seamless.

Nespithe sounds like a mix of Mental Funeral era Autopsy, Necroticism era Carcass, and Unquestionable Presence era Atheist. Intricate riffs and pounding blast beats are merged perfectly with complex rhythms and time changes that keep the listener hooked, not knowing what to expect next.

This sounds nothing like any 'technical death metal' I have ever heard. Short(ish) track times, nothing fancy like Cynic or later Death and no ridiculous fret-wankery. This is way heavier and more evil. It sounds like Autopsy on acid.

The overall production is superb and for such and underground release it is a real surprise.

The guitar sound is deep and rich, corrosive and stacked with reverb. The playing is superb and I can hear similarities between the playing of Boman and Hytönen to that of Schaefer and Burkey from Atheist, and Mameli and Uterwijk of Pestilence. It's technical, but at the same time it never loses that loose feel that is so typical of Scandinavian death metal.

The drumming is beautifully fluid throughout the album, reminding me of Chris Reifert and Nicke Andersson. Mikko Virnes puts in a great performance, easily mixing jazz-orientated rhythms with blast beats and doom-outs. His performance is excellent, as is the drum sound.

With the bass guitar virtually non-existent it really is the rhythm guitar and drums which are the backbone of this recording. The production is crystal clear, but at the same time it sounds like it was recorded in a cave, deep underground, adding an atmospheric eeriness to the proceedings.

A lot is said about Antti Boman's vocals and while they are totally OTT - the most guttural vocals I have ever heard (the closest comparison I can think of is Bill Steer's vocals for early Carcass, but way deeper than that) - they do not detract from the music at all. That said, for me, they don't add a huge amount, reason being that they are undecipherable and, more importantly, the music is so captivating, so all consuming, that I barely hear the vocals. They are fairly low in the mix but sound quite detached from the other instrument tracks as well. I listen to this whole album and barely hear the vocals. It has to be said, though, that if they really were effect-free then they are undoubtedly the most outrageous vocals ever recorded.

In addition to the great music, the track titles are hilarious - "The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)", and "Inherited Bowel Levitation - Reduced Without Any Effort". It hints at the fact that they didn't take things (including themselves) too seriously.

I'm conscious of the fact that this review may make it seem as though the album is just a mix of Atheist, Carcass, Autopsy etc, but I have to say, while I can hear elements of those outfits in Demilich's music, this band is one of the most singularly original extreme metal acts ever to grace this rotten stage.

The band has made the whole album available for free download from its website, along with demos, rehearsals and live material, due to it getting shafted by Necropolis which didn't pay them royalties for sales of the reissue. It's a shame that they were put in the position where they felt they had to do this, but at the same time it means you have no excuse whatsoever for not listening to Demilich.

Download the album, check it out and then please seek out a proper copy of the album - you won't be disappointed.

Burp.

BUUUUUURRRRRRRPPPPP!!!!!!!

If you’re new to harsh vocals, that would be your general impression of Demilich’s Nespithe. Indeed, these are some of the weirdest vocals in all of metal. What some people tend not to notice, however, is that this is generally some of the weirdest music in all of metal. Luckily, that’s what happens to make this so undeniably awesome in every way.

What we have here is simply the best Finnish death metal album that will ever be written, and possibly one of the best death metal albums in general. Yes, Nespithe is just that great. As usual for Finndeath, “that tone” is present. The interesting thing about it here is that it’s not muddy like it is on many Finndeath albums. Instead, it’s very clear, and that clarity makes every other instrument on the album that much more audible and discernible from each other. For most Finndeath, that really isn’t necessary. It may be great, but old school death metal tends to not be on the more technical side of things. Well, Demilich kindly objected to that generalization, and created a highly dissonant album with convoluted song structures and an atmosphere that is unlike anything in death metal. The clear guitar sound, and the excellent production in general, lets everything be heard down to the last detail.

It’s odd to find that the atmosphere on any album can be most defined by the vocals, but this is certainly the case here. It’s hard to describe, but the vocals here are just other-worldly. This literally feels like the croakings of a monster from an extra-dimensional dystopian wasteland. Ok, now I got my excessively descriptive sentence out of the way. Seriously, though, the vocals here are literally the most unique vocals in all of metal. I don’t even know if anyone else can even get anywhere close to replicating this. The members of Demilich claim that there were no effects used on the vocals while recording Nespithe, and since no evidence is known to the contrary, I think we have to take them on their word for now. Hopefully this is the case, because a performance this unorthodox being made naturally be a human being is an awesome thought.

The guitarwork here is some of the best in all of death metal. The riffs here are dissonant, yet also fucking catchy. Seriously, this may seem inaccessible at first, but once you get used to it, you’ll realize how fucking catchy these riffs are! The song structures are always progressing, so riffs never become stale, but the transitions from riff to riff are executed incredibly well. If anything, the transitions are one of the most important factors that accentuate the catchiness of each riff. Yet what also makes these riffs so great is how well they work in conjunction with the drums. The drum rhythms alternate from simple to unorthodox with ease, and each of these percussive rhythms work incredibly well with each riff to further emphasize the off-kilter rhythmic structures that Demilich emphasizes. An interesting thing about the drum rhythms here is that there are very few blastbeats, and when they’re used, it’s for very short periods of time. If you ask me, that is probably best for Demilich’s brand of death metal, because it leaves room for the vocals and guitars, and gives the percussion a change to support the music in more ways than just “being brutal.” Hell, this isn’t even a brutal album at all. It sticks to the same pace for pretty much the entire running time, yet manages to stay interesting throughout. As much as I love my evil, brutal, and relentlessly heavy death metal, I have a lot of respect for bands that put atmosphere over brutality and create albums that far surpass almost every other album in terms of general quality.

Overall, what we have here is an amazing piece of classic Finnish death metal. This is easily a “top five” death metal album of all time for me, and there’s really no reason why anyone shouldn’t like it. If you’ve gotten past your “I hate harsh vocals” stage of n00b-dom as a metal fan, then this really isn’t as inaccessible as some make it out to be. Sure, the vocals are incredibly guttural, but they’re not oppressive guttural or painful to listen to. I actually find them to be quite soothing. Musically, this is one of the more adventurous death metal albums, and for its atmosphere alone, you should check it out. Luckily, Demilich have it on their website for free download, both in VBR~224kbps quality mp3 and FLAC formats. Go download this classic now!

Written for http://thenumberoftheblog.com/

Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about this record is just how different it sounds to the rest of what this unremitting genre has to offer. Demilich have accumulated a myriad of fans and critics (thusly exposure) on the basis of how, in almost every effect, they are truly unique. However it is also essential to note that uniqueness in itself is of little validity without an egregiously solid or acquiescently harmonious sound base, which is almost exactly what Demilich offers.

Unlike most classical works without the realm of Metal, Demilich is duly noted for the most bizarre and possibly inhuman vocals ever delivered from Luciano Pavarotti to Rob Halford, (please do not misapprehend this to be a true comparison, they are entirely different singers altogether) Antti Boman manages to give this album an entirely new dimension which prior to the existence of this record, hadn't yet come to existence. It is true that the main attraction of this album, or rather, the curiosity directed towards it, is because of this enigmatically eccentric, vocalized type of death metal, yet Demilich also propose much more.

The riffs throughout the entire album are without a doubt abrasive, and might even deter first time listeners altogether. Demilich have opted to completely ditch the idea of creating riffs which would induce a physical seizure (unlike Morbid Angel or Sepultura) yet favored a much more pragmatic, and dare I say, musically profound approach which does not rest on any single instrument. The entire band seems to flow altogether, with sufficient mastery of their instruments, without overdoing it in terms of speed. Keep in mind that this record was released in 1993, where bands like Nile, Necrophagist, Psycroptic and Dying Fetus hadn't released true Technical Death Metal per say.

The guitars are without a doubt enjoyable. You won't find yourself frequently headbanging to the guitar riffs, yet, much like Richard Wagner, you'll find yourself in awe of just how well they are assembled. Demilich pride themselves more on how eccentric and wild they sound, rather than how catchy. Yet regardless, there are many moments throughout this album when the guitars do come together to make something which most death metal would find admirable. Palm mute picking and legatos are all over the place, so expect a lot less melody and more frenzy. Solos aren't exceptional as one would have hoped, yet I wouldn't have expected anything like Malmsteen on this record, instead you have highly anti melodic stances and sporadic appearances of what might appear to be a solo.

Drums are perhaps the most unremarkable asset to this album. Virnes is by no means a slouch, he is infact a double bass freak, not so much his speed, yet the fact he enjoys giving it a go at every opportunity. However he doesn't exactly manage to capture anything truly worthy of mention, and prefers to remain within the background of the musical constrict than credit for an awesome performance as say, Flo Mounier of Cryptopsy would.

An instrument which does deserve credit is bass however, surprisingly audible and interesting, it would have been very interesting to see what Corpse would have been capable of producing in later records, he clearly has the finesse to play the instrument.

Overall I would say the average death metal fan might not find this album intriguing, although there is no denying the fact that Demilich have produced something which is absolutely distinctive and maybe even unrecognizable. A truly legendary death metal album in every construct and one, which although might not have changed the general consensus to this genre, will remain a pillar of death metal for all time. One would have wanted to listen to what this group could have offered rather than let ones own imagination wearily drift.

Somehow in the recent years Demilich has been removed from their obscurity that befell them in the 90's into these sort of god-like beings ever since some poor schlub discovered this album on a whim. I can see why people would find this album entertaining, but let's get to the point:

It's not very good.

A simple, generalized blanket statement like that won't get me very far so it's best to explain that, isn't it? Well, first off is the mixing; it's atrocious. Anyone who has any sort of ear for production would hear immediately that the drums are far too low, the vocals are stilted and not centered, and the guitars are so spaced left and right, and have so little distortion that the resulting sound is one of airy weakness.

Sure, lack of distortion is not bad, but when you lack distortion you record multiple takes of the same guitar track to beef up the sound, which they obviously never did, or they multi-tracked really weak distortion. I also mentioned the lowness of the drums, and that is a big problem. The vocals overpower everything when they enter, and that is a shame since the vocals are a wobbly mess.

Some people seem to have marked the vocals as god-like, akin to the Wormed style (Phlegeton), and this too puzzles me. The band denies any vocal effects, but it's kind of apparent that they did something to them. The human voice simply does not reverberate the way Antti's vocals do on this album, and the pitch is similar to a burp, a sound that a human cannot constantly do as displayed here. Until I have seen Annti's live mic-rig, and heard them play live, I will maintain that they are pitch shifted a full step down. When you re-pitch the album a full step, the whole thing sounds a lot more presentable and believe. Oh, and I can't forget that vocals seem recorded by an amateur, as in they always shifting where they are in the mix, left -> right -> left, etc.

Anyways, enough bashing the production. The song's have ridiculous titles that have made me chuckle more than anything, but the whole word displacement like "Nespithe" = "The Spine" and "Erecshyrinol" = "No Lyrics Here" is a pretty cool concept, but it falls face first after such anthems as "The Planet That Once Used to Absorb Flesh in Order to Achieve Divinity and Immortality (Suffocated to the Flesh That It Desired...)". That's a bit nitpicky, and I didn't subtract points for it, but come on!

Onto the positives.

The riff writing is maniacal absurdity, and that definitely makes up for the lack of production finesse. The whole atmosphere of the album is one of foreboding, very akin to a story by a certain H.P. Lovecraft. The whole album, I feel, is analogous to his story "The Music of Erich Zann". To clue you in, if you hadn't read the thing, it's about a man who finds a lodging on a street that he can't remember even finding, only to come into contact with a man capable of writing and hearing melodies that drive off an intradimensional force that only he can see because of his apparent height in an apartment building.

The titular musician is beset by the floundered student, and attempts to explain to him all of his troubles, but is overcome by the music so much that he is killed by the other forces, but is playing his melodies even after death, to ward his corpse of evils.

If you felt a chill down your spine whilst listening to this album and reading that explanation (as I did when writing it), you get it. That is the atmosphere: bizarre and confusing, but also horrifying and spectacular in its beauty. The atmosphere itself makes up for the production, drumming, and guitar issues (and the vocal confusion).

My low score might have given a negative connotation of my opinion towards this album, but that is not the case at all. While listening to the whole thing can be tiring, as the whole thing sticks to a plodding pace, and the drums are so tinny and processed that the semi-trained ear will laugh at this, but the atmosphere is hellish and twisted. An amorphous horror creeping towards your brain, devouring your will to live along the way, letting you sink into a nice safe zone to be devoured by this album eternally.

Demilich has got to be one of the most awe-inspiring death metal bands ever from the early days. Four demos’ and one full-length later they broke up which is sad, leaving us with only these releases to marvel at. The full-length “Nespithe” is absolutely essential to any technical metal heads collection.

From the opening riff and double bass section on the first track you get the idea that with most of these songs being released in the early 90’s on the demos, this band was ahead of their time. The first seven songs are completely flawless. Dual guitars with some of the catchiest leads of the time are on display here, while the drum work of Mikko Virnes is on par with that of Mike Smith and Pete Sandoval. His doubles bass work is the perfect speed which complements the whirling guitar work, while the well placed blast beats were some of the best of that era. I personally think his blast beats were the best of the early 90’s.

The band also spices up the low end with some great rhythm work on tracks one, four, and six. Rhythm riffs ride underneath the leads or the solos, in a profound yet catchy sense, leaving you wanting more. In fact that’s the one aspect I can’t seem to get enough of, and wish they had released a second album expanding on this songwriting idea. The eighth song is an instrumental which goes a little overboard at times with the technical instrumentation, sort of like a foundation for “Cabinet” era Spawn of Possession. However that is all but a small complaint. The remaining tracks fall right back into place with the first seven.

The overall catchiness of the riff writing and song writing is unparalleled especially for 1993. No other band sounded like this that I know of and the overall technical prowess of this band was a tier above all others in the death metal scene in that era. This release is inspiration for bands we know today such as Spawn of Possession, Sulaco, Carpharnaum, and later era Gorguts. Check out the first demo “The Four Instructive Tales of Decomposition" while you’re at it for the proof that the vocals on “Nespithe” were done without effects.

Technical death metal appears to have found some kind of new leese of life recently, with most "promising" new death metal bands having a ridiculously squeaky clean production and having lots of fun playing scales at break-neck speed. Note that I did not at any point use the words "song" and "writing" in that description, and that is where the problem has been with alot of modern death metal.

I would love to tell you that this band is here to stop all that, but they already have, way back in the early 90's. This album is praised by a few and unknown by many, so I will tell you now that newer death metal bands may learn a thing or two by listening to this underground classic.

The sound present here is technical yet atmospheric, heavy but also melodic and chaotic yet very well ordered. Similarities to "Necroticism" era Carcass have been made and I can see the comparison, however everything on display is just a little more unpredictable and schizophrenic. The vocals, for example, are similar to Bill Steers backing vocals in Carcass' older albums but just that bit lower, and less human. These vocals may come across as reasonably similar to every dime-a-dozen "Brutal" vocalist, but these are delivered in a way that they accompany the insanity and atmospheric quality of the music perfectly.

Guitars play chromatcially orientated melodic lines that tend to vary greatly in scalic hierachy,but always make sense in the context of the song. Songwriting is precisely thought out, seemingly random at first like jazz, however further listens reveal the themes and motifs played regularly re-ocurr throughout the song like some kind of extra-terrestrial symphony. The production work on this albums also adds to this feel with the sound being very clear but also deep and still retaining an ancient feel similar to other death metal bands of the legendary era.

Another great aspect of the release is its tempo variation accompanied by a very intricate rhythm section. The sludgy melodic lines twinned with the guttural vocals are tamed by an always audible bass and a very impressive drum performance. The bass here is written very purposefully and does not always follow the guitar line as in common in much of metal music, even sometimes taking the lead which is more noticeable in tracks such as "The Cry". The production and guitar technique lead to these possibilities, as the guitar plays very long melodic riffs that are also often very catchy , which creates an opportunity for the bass
to create an undercurrent of low end heading off in a different direction wherever necessary.

Drums are played very competently and are written to be part of a whole rather than sounding like the drummer is trying to let you know just how great he is. They vary from some doomy sounding slow beats all the way to a full on blast and most devices in between. The fills and transitions of the drum patters remind me alot of the drumming on early Atheist recordings, where the fills are cleverly syncopated and blasts and double kick used to accent the more crushing areas of the songs. This maintains a more personal feel for the listener rather than just being the borderline technical exercise combined with over-triggered sound that many drummers in modern death metal bands seem to utilise.

Overall this release sees another early 90's expression of morbid beauty and is as original today as it was back when it was released. If you are able to track it down I suggest paying the price, however these artists have made it available for free download from their website, so you have no excuse to not sit back and be taken to another planet that once used to absorb flesh in order to achieve divinity
and immortality.

Demilich
Nespithe
Necropolis, 1993

What a disgusting beast of an album released by Demilich back in 1993. After listening to the first few seconds of the opener “When the Sun Drank the Weight of Water”, you know you are in for something quite different and unusually strange. Demilich is labeled as technical death metal, however I don’t see them as exactly technical, because they leave out all the unnecessary wankery that you may find in a lot of music labeled as technical. What Demilich does manage to do is create a wonderfully unusual blend of guitar riffing that is fairly high-pitched and tends to be broken and somewhat unrelated, but they manage to make all of the riffs work together to form one highly unique album. The guitars basically sound like a sonic boom bouncing all over the walls of a deep cave (I don’t think that will help much). The guitars swamp you will a swirling wall of sound unlike anything I’ve heard before.

To be honest, it is difficult to write a review that really gives you a good idea of what the guitar work sounds like on this album, but there are some aspects that can be described in relatively close proximity. For example, the vocal work on this album is just insane. Antti Boman sounds like a belching demon frog unlike any other. Not that there are many belching demon frogs as a vocalist in death metal, but that is about as close as you can get to describing the vocal style on this album. This is actually quite close and it is really a good change to hear something so bizarre and unique that is just makes you wonder how Antti Boman’s voice is able to do this over the course of the album without becoming permanently damaged. Antti Boman uses some cryptic lyrics as well giving just a little bit more of a mystique to this already out-of-this-world album (just look at the song titles).

The drumming on this album is really balanced well. Mikko Virnes does an excellent job in playing to the guitarists and never taking attention off of them since the guitars are the main focal point in Nespithe. If you don’t stop to listen to the drumming you may never realize just how entertaining they are since they are a little lower in the mix. The great thing about the drumming is that he doesn’t use blast after blast, the style is more of a Tomas Haake-esque of broken fractured drumming that I tend to love. Of course, Nespithe in general sounds like a mixture of broken glasses fused together to create the overall song structures, which makes them very confusing and technical in a loose sense of the word.

I would go through the album giving some sort of a relative description song by song, but I think I lack the words (and the energy) to really capture whatever this album is. I will say this album manages to suck me into the sick disfigured world that Demilich has managed to construct and keep me there throughout the album without any trouble. The best thing that you can do if you fancy yourself a death metal fan is to give this album a few listens, but I’m betting it would be difficult to find any death metal fan that hasn’t listened to this album except for people new to death metal.

It is a real shame that this is the only full-length ever put out by Demilich, because this album was simply chaotic brilliance. Nespithe was ahead of its time and still sounds fresh and highly original 16 years after its initial release.

Favorite songs:
The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)
The Echo (Replacement)
The Putrefying Road in the Nineteenth Extremity (...Somewhere Inside the Bowels of Endlessness...)
And You'll Remain... (In Pieces in Nothingness)
Erecshyrinol

I reviewed this album about 4-5 years ago, and I raved about how great this record was. Before it got removed, I had been meaning to update the review, it was very childish, it looked like a 15 year old had wrote it. But that doesn't really matter, the point of the review was to talk about how great this album is. I consider Demilich's Nespithe to be one of two "towers" of death metal: albums so untouchable, along with Gorguts' classic Obscura album, that they "tower" above everything else. I don't know what possessed these drunk Finnish guys to write this mind-warping record, but I'm really glad they did. It's impressive.

First off, I highly recommend anyone not familiar with this band to visit Demilich's official website and download this, and all their demo material. The demo works had, as another review put it, a putrid, rotten sound. To me, the demo tapes were old slabs of beef, and the music were the maggots slowly eating away at the decaying flesh. However, the leap from the demos to this record is astounding. The music no longer reminds you of 2 month old milk. This makes you picture unexplored universes, the darkest depths of existance, and the most paranoid sectors of your mind. It's a sci-fi movie almost, with the twisting, burrowing guitars jumping from riff to riff, melody to atonal melody, all kept in some sort of awkward alignment by the drum work. I've been listening to death metal for a long time, and I've yet to find an album that sounds like this. And all this without taking Antti Boman's vocals into account. I've seen a few discussions on whether Antti pitchshifted his vocals to sound the way they do, but I highly doubt it. They sound like a drunk man burping into a microphone. Yet somehow this makes sense. It's a voice from the past, present, and future. It's the voice of a subconscious mind. I cannot imagine any other vocal style fitting the music as well as these vocals do.

My only two complaints are the usual old school death metal complaints: the bass is not very audible, and the album is too short. Valid complaints to be sure, but they seem so insignificant here. Looking at the big picture of this album, everything is as it should be. Nespithe wouldn't be Nespithe if you changed it even the slightest bit. It's an album to be heard at least once in your lifetime, because there isn't anything as strange sounding, or as musically filling, as this is. Simply put, this album will stand the test of time. Not because of what genre it is, not because of the history of the band, or anything else, except the music. This is some strange, twisted music, an example of creativity unlike any other.

This album is beyond bizarre, abstract and just pure fucking chaos. There’s hardly any other way to describe how utterly strange and otherworldly this album sounds. Its also difficult to express just how fucking great it is.

Throughout the album, Demilich explore the abstract realm, the universe and beyond. The realms of the abstract are explored with eerie and chaotic melodies that sound somewhat disjointed and alienating. Strangely enough however, they are not malformed and are sequenced quite smoothly; never stepping out of the boundaries of coherency. It is as if though they find order within chaos, or chaos within order. Never before has melodic interplay been so dissonant and chaotic, but yet beautiful in its own strange way.

Exploration is taken further with unpredictable song construction that seems somewhat random but ,as stated previously, coherent. They certainly do manage to obtain a sense of chaos with their unpredictable arrangements, but they never just throw in random riffs for their own sake. Every song is composed coherently and with creative thought.

Identifiable recursive song structures are nonexistent. Songs are mostly linearly constructed, always moving forward and never looking back. Of course, there’s no mean to say that Demilich blast their way through this at 299 bpm. Throughout the album Demilich prefers to plod at a nice groovy mid pace tempo with the occasional blasting section. Indeed, they take their time exploring and discovering the cosmic planes and the mind within.

Of course, whats exploration if you don’t have people with the guts to explore? Especially a realm that is as chaotic as that of the abstract. Demilich are not only explorers and discoverers, but they are also able musicians as well. Guitar melodies are just pain fucking weird, constantly evolving and on the move, never settling down to any mere pretentious simplistic riffage or sappy melodies. The melodic interplay is almost alien, expressing all things abnormal, chaotic and, well, abstract.

Drumming is not the most complex thing in the world, but its just exactly were it needs to be, and there is no senseless wanking off. Drumming exists to provide some killer groove as they drift into unknown dimensions.

Bass is also a worthy mention. Counterpoints exist in the bass department for the sake of yet even more chaos weirdness. Then we have the vocalist. The vocalist utilizes an amazingly low and guttural belch that sounds really sick and ugly. Hey, whoever said that the abstract realm was a pretty place anyway?

All instruments harmonize in an obscure way, just like the cosmos itself. I guess its safe to say that Nespithe is the soundtrack to the cosmos. This album is very obscure and otherworldly, just like the cosmos. This album also harmonizes in its own strange and abstract way, just like the cosmos. Whatever it is that Demilich tried to express, there is no doubt that this is one of the most fascinating and matchless Death Metal albums ever created.

While it’s not true that all death metal sounds alike, it could certainly stand to be less true – and this is not a call for flutes or jazz or… Hell forbid, Egyptian music. The worst path to supposed originality in any kind of music, and probably any kind of anything, is to take something stereotypical and combine it with something weird and call it a day. Genre conventions are usually not completely arbitrary – death metal’s aesthetics exist for a reason, and breeching them simply for the sake of doing so rarely leads to satisfying results.

The best path to originality, on the other hand, is simply to have a unique point of view. Unfortunately, I suppose you either have your own perspective or you don’t, and calculated attempts to simulate one are sure to make for an inadequate substitute for the real thing.

Demilich possesses a unique point of view. This album’s booklet encodes the lyrics in a cryptogram. Note the bizarre, surreal song titles as well. More conspicuously – most conspicuously, in fact, of all the band’s idiosyncrasies – are those vocals, which sound like… a pitch-shifted demon frog from the bowels of Hell? Could be. Only he’s not using any processing after all, which just makes it that much scarier.

Those are only a few of the more visible signs of the strangeness permeating this music. It is probably not possible to adequately describe the riffing style in words. I have heard Demilich described as technical metal, but I’ve never really thought of them as such. This may be tricky music, but it doesn’t sound forced, or like a demonstration. It simply sounds unnatural, lurching from one note to the next in a very wrong-sounding way.

Insanity is a standard theme in metal and especially in death metal. Ordinarily it’s dealt with from the perspective of a criminologist, callous and apathetic, like an autopsy. Nespithe makes me think of insanity, but viewed from the inside out, in a state of alienation from reality. That would be Demilich’s unique point of view?

This release (the only full length) from the Finnish quartet has surely made people scratch their collective noggins. Indeed a very unique sound they have achieved. With this unique sound, they have achieved a certain cult following, and rightfully so. The off-kilter riffs and otherworldly, bowel rumblingly low vocals from frontman Anti Bowman and the overall sound off total chaos have added to the mystique of Nesphite.

They have a certain dynamic which is hard to explain, but their sound is very much that of "extraterrestial" sludgy, melodic death metal (with grindy passages no less). The listener is wowed with an assembly of strange riffs and drum patterns which are difficult to follow the first time around. Multiple listens are required to get a good grasp of what it is all about. The recording of the album adds alot to its appeal. Most instruments are heard quite clearly in this high pitched mess. The guitar sometimes sounds buried under the drums and vocals, but this does not detract from the actual experiance. The sound is still very crisp and enjoyable.

The lyrics and song titles are wonderfully funny ("When the Sun Drank the Weight of the Water"... ?!?!?!?!) and show that they do not take themselves too seriously.

The flow is very good as all tracks seem to follow up the preceeding one perfectly.

While being quite technical, they never go "balls to the wall" tech by shedding the living hell out of their guitars or ripping the drum heads off. Yet the solos are extremely enjoyable in their oddly melodic glory. The album is far from simple, rather it take a differant approach to be technical/unconventional. Completely original, never boring, they manage to find a way to stay complex without boring the listener.

Be sure to go over to their website to download the FULL album (along with the excellant demos) to enjoy this lost classic.

If non-humanoid space aliens ever sent a probe to our solar system with a golden record of their finest music, it probably would not be far off from Demilich's Nespithe. This is one of the most bizarre, psychedelic albums I have ever heard, and the track names only provide a glimpse of how outlandish this album is. Though classified as death metal, this strikes me as something created outside of planet Earth.

The first thing that someone will notice upon hearing it is the vocals -- the first thing I thought when I heard it was that the vocalist was the most impressive belcher I had ever heard, though that's actually not the case. They vocals are beyond guttural, and from what I recall reading, are naturally created through some method of tilting the head down. The lyrics are beyond the wildest fantasies of any space madness-induced hallucination, and I can not even begin to describe them in a sober state of mind.

The musical structure of the album is convoluted and beyond chaotic, yet is coherent. While the music can be difficult to follow due to its chaos, its countless riffs linger in the mind individually. Most are twangy, some are death/thrashy, but all of them seem to fit into place. The pace of the album seems to be smooth the entire way through, regardless of the occasional blasting and non-shred solos, progressing at a medium pace, which is possibly why the album doesn't sound like a complete cacophony.

This is a unique album, and should be appreciated as such. It's not exactly aesthetically pleasing or exciting in any traditional senses, and it won't strike anyone as "heavy fucking metal," but it is so weird that not acquiring it through whatever means (it's free for download) will leave you incomplete.

After discovering that Demilich(or any band for that matter) put up their whole discography for full-length downloads on their website, I was totally shocked. Heh, I thought Vanden Plas offered their latest album Beyond Daylight for a full download, but they didn't.

Needless to say, I was totally blown away to hear this. I don't understand the legal situation as to why this was a free download, etc., but I do know that the band members were very upset that the rerelease of Nespithe and their first demo didn't sell well. No offense to Demilich, but I figured that none of their albums would sell well. It's not because they're not good...oh no they're far from not good--it's just that they're on a relatively obscure record label and not well-known. That's a valid assumption, isn't it?

Well, I downloaded three tracks at a time from their site and eventually burned the album and listened to it from beginning to end and I must say this is some groundbreaking work. Other reviewers may think I'm crazy, but Demilich's overall style sounds like a head-on collision of Disembowelment and Meshuggah, especially with the sound of Meshuggah's Nothing album. Sure, Demilich doesn't change tempos quite as much and it's not as jagged and jarring, but they have a tremendous wall of sound from track one to track eleven. It's another one of those albums that isn't easy to headbang to because the main melodies aren't decipherable enough. It's meant to be listened to simply as a work of art and not an outlet for metalheads' aggression. I admit that I did find myself headbanging occasionally, but not too often. Maybe if I wasn't busy cleaning up my room I would've headbanged more to it.

It's been said before that the vocalist sounds like he's talking out of his small-intestine, and I guess I say that I concur. How can someone make this assertion though? Has anyone ever talked out of his or her small intestine? That sounds like something only possible in the silly microcosmic world of Cannibal Corpse. To make it simpler, I'll just say that the vocals sound similar to that of grindcore bands or experimental brutal death metal bands like Wormed. They're very unique. Don't take it from me. Download the album. It's beckoning you.

Unlike Nothing, this has quite a lot of soloing, which is always refreshing to hear in death metal. Immolation has especially good soloing, by the way. The solos usually come near the end of the songs and that adds a dramatic effect to them.

Like UltraBoris said about Pantera's Reinventing the Steel, this album suffers from overconsistency a little bit(haha, funny term), but it's more acceptable for this type of music, which attempts to drown the listener in a massive whirlpool of sound. For styles similar to Pantera's, it's more appropriate for songs to have stronger identities. Heh, it's an abstract concept.

I can see why this album is thought of as a classic death metal album. That distinction is not only for the music, but because of the notoriety of it. It's like that Mayhem album with the picture of dead Euronymous on the front cover.

Anyone remotely into death metal, especially unique, intelligent death metal, should download this ASAP. Anyone who says there's no excuse for not having this album if you're a fan of death metal is partly wrong. There are a lot of factors that come into play that could hinder someone from downloading this, but try to download it FIRST before deciding to order it.

Oh, and another thing, the song titles on this release are out of this world. I particularly like the one named Inherited Bowel Levitation- Reduced Without Any Effort. Does this title mean that someone inherited the ability to shit into the toilet without sitting down? Does it also mean that someone inherited the ability to stand up over the toilet and mechanically lower their rectum to be sure the turds fall into the toilet and don't splash water all over the place?

Eh, I'm just making fun of the song titles and how the lyrical themes for this band on this site mention abstract concepts. Hey, this band, in essence, could be making the simple art of taking a shit abstract. You never know.