Desaster / Ungod

Practice makes perfect. This might be the reason why Desaster were able to perform a fairly complex song like "The Hill of a Thousand Souls" already at an early stage of their career. The track, written by guitarist Infernal and session drummer Thorim, demonstrated in an impressive way that they did not need to fear complicated song structures. Of course, they did not choose a progressive approach in a narrower sense. But they avoided the verse-chorus-verse pattern successfully without lacking coherence. While combining traditionally orientated sections and high speed parts in a masterly manner, the group revealed its full potential. Thorim´s challenging drumming marked the most noteworthy detail, although the other band members were in good shape, too. The charismatic Okkulto, for instance, attracted attention by some pretty cruel screams. The only minor drawback arose from the fact that the song was not very memorable. Regardless of this, it´s nice to listen to it from time to time.

Unfortunately, Ungod contributed just a mediocre black metal piece and a completely worthless outro. The fast-paced "Aeon of Sunless Dominion" was aggressive, noisy and hateful. But that alone was not enough. The simple melody lines and the primitive drumming were rather poor. The vocals did not add value, too. All this led to the fact that the band failed to create an appropriate aura. A dark dominion did definitely not appear in front of my inner eye. Furthermore, the track suffered from a humming sound. Aggravating this situation, the computerized outro made no sense. All in all, it seemed like amateurs were at work, full of enthusiasm and with a few good ideas, but without a clear concept.

The simple packaging of the split single emphasized the underground character of the release. A small slip of paper was attached. Due to the bad quality of its black and white images, especially Desaster´s Odin looked like the friendly corpse from next door. But however, Desaster delivered the better contribution to this unchristian cooperation while laying the cornerstone for their further career.

This split consists of Ungod and Desaster both from Germany. The first song is “Aeons of Sunless Dominion” the sound is very basic and raw. You could say these guys got into a garage and taped themselves on a walkman or something. The amazing thing is even with the poor sound; Ungod delivers a blistering track of unrelentless black metal. The vocals are downright haunting, a high-pitched scream that is just full of absolute evil. The vocals are complimented with simple but amazingly malevolent sounding riffs. The split is worth acquiring for this song alone. The second track is an outro, it clocks in at 1:32 and is just some ambient noises, creepy stuff.

Then comes Desaster with “The Hill of a Thousand Souls”. The sound over all is better than the Ungod track, its pretty simple black metal, fast paced drumming, melodic guitars and the high-pitched screams. Though not as intimidating and hellish sounding as Ungod’s vocalist, Desaster pulls it off and actually got me head banging mid way through the song! Great split, no poser black metal here, this is black metal that crushes you into the ground.