Sanguinary Emperor – MMXXIII Demo cassette

Sanguinary Emperor – MMXXIII Demo cassette

"The MMXXIII Demo that I discovered last year on the awesome No Gleaming Light Youtube channel was my first hit of Sanguinary Emperor, and man, it came on hard. At the time (October of '23), I stumbled across this horror-show out of the fuckin' blue, and had my spinal column warped by the psychotic, inhuman slow-motion filth that came creeping out of my speakers. Where the band's more recent material features a full trio hammering out Sanguinary Emperor's gross bestial black doom, the Demo MMXXIII is the very first recording from the project and is entirely created and recorded by founding member E.X.. Aside from the natural progression from a one-man outfit to a full power-trio, what really sets these three songs apart is the abject, crumbling atmosphere and structure, the songs having an almost formless heaviness that feels like being dunked into a sewage pit again and again while some kind of blasphemous black ritual is taking place around the outer rim. It ain't pretty.

It's substantially more fucked-up than the subsequent recordings. In the space of about twelve minutes, E.X. drags you by the feet into a sprawling, stinking abyss of slaytanic sludge that at times devolves into a kind of necrotic hell-drone. Song titles like "Infernal Cavern", "Satanic Death House", and "Evocations" are pretty evocative of the visions running through E.X.'s demented skull, but the music is even more wrecked and wretched than the "bestial doom" tag would lead you to expect. The songs are stumbling, slow-motion crawling things sweating diseased blood and exuding stinking sulfur, monstrous (and insanely deep) guttural roars echoing in the depths as the brain-damaged drumming plods along incessantly, barbaric two-chord riffs churning over and over while swarms of sickening double bass and tremolo-picked drone surges from below. The music is dense but primitive and simplistic - there's almost an early (and I mean fucking early) Swans-like quality to how E.X. just grinds out one basic, world-beating, beautifully dreary riff for what seems like days, a haze of gritty, grungy distortion and fuzz and hiss and low-fi slime hanging heavy over the whole shebang.

Like the later stuff, there's that unmistakable black doom vibe, which I'm pretty sure fans of stuff like Mordor, Barathrum, and even Beherit will groove on big-time. But there's this severely weird, quasi-industrial quality to these lumbering, lurching, low-fi hate assaults that make this much more messed-up and mutated, aligning it even more closely with the weirdo Satanic dirge-crush of Looting The Tomb Of The Aramathean-era Black Mass of Absu, Ride For Revenge, Flooded Church of Asmodeus, Gonkulator, hell, even some of the more "propulsive" Abruptum material. You get my drift. This debut demo is a special kind of decrepit heaviness, with immense doom-laden riffs and genuinely eerie guitar lines drifting through the pulverizing, churning, seething death-dirge. When it culminates with the closer "Evocations", man, it feels like standing in front of an ancient, antediluvian cathedral collapsing in extreme slow motion. Goddamn awesome."