Dan Swanö today is one of the best metal producers in
Europe, but things weren’t always so. Back in 1990, at the time when this demo
was released, Edge of Sanity were a ripe young death metal band, one of the
original Swedish first wave death metallers, along with Entombed and Dismember.
While Entombed would go on to pioneer the death’n’roll minigenre and Dismember
would hold true to their old school roots, EoS became the precursor to the more
accessible niche of melodic death metal. For those of you who don’t know,
however, EoS’s material was deeper and far more eclectic than most of the
things bands like Dark Tranquility or In Flames released which made the
Gothenburg scene popular. It all built up to a legendary point in 1996 when EoS
released Crimson, a single progressive/death metal song that ran for forty
minutes and established a place for itself immediately in the death metal halls
of fame. However, the “original sound of Edge of Sanity”, as Swanö himself puts
it, was a more typical old school style similar to Death or other seminal death
metal bands. The original demo release of Kur-Nu-Gi-A (the underworld of
ancient Babylon) had five tracks played in this style and a synth outro. This
picture disc release gives us these songs remastered plus two live tracks and a
rough version of “Maze of Existence” as bonus. The demo songs are pretty cool,
although certainly dated now and not really historical death metal moments. The
live tracks are nothing to speak of, really. I never heard the quality of the
original demo, but from what I can gather it was apparently not so great. I’m
not sure if the “Maze of Existence (roughmix)” is the original, unremastered
mix or what, but it sounds very similar to the new mix earlier on the disc. So
it’s unclear to me exactly how much better the sound is here than on the
original, despite the positive rumors I can provide.
In summary: Kur-Nu-Gi-A in itself is decent, and it’s
certainly nice to be able to listen to this part of EoS’s history for those who
weren’t around back in the day, and also for fans who will appreciate the
renewed production, but the extras are really unmentionable, and in the end
this is really not a very important re-release.
Standout tracks: “Maze of Existence”
Score: 6.0
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