Review: One Master “s/t” CD

Five tracks of raw black metal that has some intrigue, but the recording sucks. I know, I know. Black metal is supposed to be raw. But there's raw that works and is aesthetically pleasing and there's raw that kind of sounds like crap and takes away from the songwriting - the latter of which is true for this demo. The drums sound okay, dry and mildly distant, but okay. But the bass I'm barely hearing, and the guitars are really bad. They're too heavy for one thing, so it sounds like they used a really thick guitar tone and made it "raw" by overloading the input levels or something to get an extra distorted bite, and the lead lines are often too acerbic and sloppy so they jump out from the rhythms too much. The vocals are lower than usual but not exactly growled, so they also sound tolerable, but they lose a lot of their character amongst the guitars. Now, the writing's not all speed or anything, nor is it constantly midpaced, so it's got a good mix going on, though the songwriting needs more focus. For example, "Immortal Frost" slows down the tempos a little more and brings in some dissonant riffing, but strangely the slowest riffs are really poorly played and that detracts from the delivery quite a bit - in fact, those riffs are absolutely dreadful in how sloppily they're performed, which is a shame as the faster portions of this seven-minute piece are pretty good. It drags as a whole though, with a clean break using synths as backup that comes out of nowhere and then shifts into a repetitive chord progression that blandly and awkwardly leads to the close of the song. The other longer and more moderately paced piece, "Shadow of the Firehorse", opens with clean guitars and faint synths and transitions into a heavier chord progression with a good buildup and a consistently structured arrangement that flows much more effectively. "Journey to the Northern Lands" is the shortest and fastest song, harnessing more force and acting as one of the more effective compositions despite performance issues. A few of the songs, namely "Son of the Morning Star", are rather worthless though - littered with poorly played riffs and a relentless attack that's more irritating than potently aggressive. The CD-R comes in a slim jewel case with a decent looking xeroxed booklet that contains faint old woodcut artwork and all of the lyrics, along with brief quotes from Nietzsche and the like to go along with the content. Some of the text is hard to read, and I'm not blown away by the content of course, but I have seen worse, and there is potential promise across the board with the aesthetics here. So, this is a really split demo as a whole. Some of the sloppiness in the performances I can handle, mainly in the drumming, but the guitars need to tighten up a lot on the slower riffs, and the recording needs to be a little different to convey an effectively rough black metal aesthetic. They seem to have some good ideas in place here, and I think there's potential for a lot of development, but above all the songwriting needs to convey more aggression and feeling, rather than coming off as jumbled and forced at times. I actually thought this was going to be a lot better than it is because there's something about the visual presentation that works and catches my attention, but... they need to keep working on honing their craft.