Astral Underground - Ratés demo 2011

Astral Underground - Ratés demo 2011
1) Bacchantes
2) Siècle d'angoisse
3) Violon
4) Ratés
5) Mes cris dans l'escalier
6) L'ère du valet
7) Nos rêves acharnés

Depositfiles 

As you have noticed, I usually post stuff from the 90's here, slowly branching into early 00's. But I do make some exceptions too and here's again one. Recorded in sessions between 2008 and 2010 this is the (so far only) 2011 demo "Ratés" by French project Astral Underground. "Why are you posting it?" someone might ask and that's certainly a justified question even though this is my blog and not that someone's, but to answer: the person behind this and another project, Clément, contacted me and sent these asking if I'd be interested in posting them here and I decided to humour his request. So there. The project went through a change in line-up and a new demo should be coming up pretty soon, with 2 additional musicians from a death metal band. Musical direction may "change from the classic "suicidal black metal" tones, but the concept beneath Astral Underground will remain the same: Description of emotional states, mental disorder, surrealistic poetry, antidepressant..."  Clément writes. We'll see soon as it's almost two months from this info (the delay is my fault, as usual) so the new release might be ready by now.

But let's return to this thing at hand for now, the demo runs over 34 minutes and seven tracks which, like mentioned in the start, were recorded during several rehearsal sessions over two years. You can hear this as the sound shifts from the raw and crispy coldness of the first two tracks (especially the second track, not so much the first instrumental one) to atmospheric, acoustic/ambient interlude with "Violon" to the slow and distant sounding desolate metal of the title track with a more voluminous sound. If you can ignore the "bedroom bm/dsbm"-associations this is actually interesting material. Next one is a shorter track and sort of minimal dark ambiance with piercing black metal shrieks, this is followed by slow paced black metal in the more suicidal vein that builds up nicely towards the end without a real release. I like the grating guitar there. Last track, which by the way is at 128kbps while the rest is 320, don't know why and unfortunately you can hear it... what was I going to write... yeah it starts a bit faster and has a bit more chaotic sound and more going on than the previous ones. It doesn't get messy, fortunately. But the lower bit rate is a little distracting. That's enough, pick this up if you got curious. If not, then wait for the next post which will be something old, dusty and possibly moldy again.