Leiru are a Hungarian band playing raw black metal. My
interest was piqued initially by the strange and somewhat ridiculous cover art
of this tape. Portraying a Picasso-esque topless woman smoking a cigarette
while sitting in a chair, this is hardly your regular black metal imagery.
Inside the music is considerably more conventional, although by no means
destined for mainstream or probably even widespread underground consumption,
although this is probably due to amateurish quality rather than daring ideas.
Certainly, no sounds on this EP relate to the poorly executed fartsy-ness
adorning the cover. There is very little information available about Leiru,
although reading their Facebook page leads one to believe they are a pretty
standard bedroom black metal project trying to do something with noisy, lo-fi
sounds in order to gain wider recognition. Apparently the former one man
project has acquired a real drummer for this release, casting off the machine
used in his previous demos, none of which I have heard.
The quality of Leiru’s music is debatable. The songs are not
written with a complete lack of skill, but they are also not written with a great
amount of substance either. Riffage is not wholly dissatisfactory black metal standard,
and the drummer, while clearly not of a professional level, does seem to
understand basic rhythmic principles that are often used to effect in metal.
The sound itself is fairly harsh, but the overall atmosphere of the music has a
kind of positive feeling commonly seen in folk metal. This is largely brought
on by the clean vocals which in my opinion are a real mistake when combined
with such raw guitar tones. The last song “Nova” is an instrumental rehearsal
and is by the far the rawest and best, although there is a very distasteful
solo that features one the most irritating squeals of a guitar tone I’ve heard
in a long time. No interesting experimentation happening here as I was hoping
for, just some very harsh yet average melodic BM, unfocused music made for
abstract personal reasons.
In short: A band that will probably never make it, and one
that you will probably never listen to, Leiru aren’t disgustingly awful, yet
there’s no way I could call them good. Have a laugh at the cover art and move
on.
Standout tracks: None
Score: 4.5
No comments:
Post a Comment