Eastern Europe was producing some really weird metal during the early 90s. Case in point, Hospice. They were a death metal band from Belarus that formed in 1991, released a demo and a full-length, then broke up. We begin with their demo, Contraries.
When I pushed play, I never expected anything this crazy. Let me start off by saying that the production is pretty good for a demo. It's nice and clear and I can hear everything quite clearly. The music is another story. It's starts off normally enough. It's basically death metal with a touch of thrash metal. The drums play lots of simple blast beats that implement a great deal of double bass. The vocals consist of a raspy, death/thrash growl. It's not the best, but it still gets the job done. As for the guitars, they play lots of fast and simple thrashing riffs as well as some more progressive tremolo riffs. It's obvious to me that this guy took a lot of time to hone his craft.
Then comes the crazy stuff. It starts off with some bass that is incredibly high in the mix. That's okay. I've listened to a lot of albums that have prominent bass. But starting with the song “Zakkhey”, we go into some weird places. About halfway through the song, we get a jazzy performance that is complemented by surf rock guitars. Then it goes back to slow, plodding death metal as if nothing happened. We get a bit of that for a while but then the jazzy surf rock shows up again. What is this I don't even. That's some !T.O.O.H.!-level crazy right there. Then we get an awesome guitar solo. Um, thanks, I guess.
This demo was really strange, but I love their brand of strange. It reminds me of !T.O.O.H.! and other deranged bands. Besides, the awesome guitar work will make up for any craziness people don't like. I just wonder what their full-length has in store for me.
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