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DEMOTED
Envenomed Redemption

Hostile (2021)
Rating: 8/10

I’ve been keeping a beady-eye on this one-man death metal band since last year’s Back To The Grave demo which impressed me greatly. Sole member Filip Garlonta has been an extremely busy man, what with the follow-up EP In The Flesh And Bones (November 2020) and now this 30-minute debut full-length.

Romanian death metal is not something I’ve followed as a scene, but Garlonta really does know his chops and this affair certainly stirs the senses.

After a short instrumental intro we are hit by ‘Gateway To The Void’, a deep, eye-gouging and very much fusty accessible rumble of guttural vocal prowess and mid-paced message. It’s certainly no frills death metal, but there’s just something so vintage about those melancholic solos and that bellowing, stormy rumble of bass and percussion.

‘Forever Haunting The Earth’ ups the speed, Filip Garlonta taking Demoted’s sound to a death rattle where all instruments gnash with unrelenting pace and bring all manner of influences to mind – shaking them all up in a pot and spewing them out to result in a familiar yet undeniably catchy tirade of gruesome cacophony.

Demoted’s sound is so wonderfully organic, bristly with embryonic passages and conjuring graven images, as with the excellent ‘Back To The Grave’ with its atmospheric intro of cawing crow and sombre church bell clang which give way to doom-laden heaving. Monolithic riffs lope eerily, bleeding into the infectious strains of ‘Tower Of The Undead’ where Garlonta literally becomes king of the zombies with his drooling vocal slurs. ‘Tower Of The Undead’ is a favourite of mine for its morbid chugging and that dense, musty groove.

The title track judders with further suspense, while ‘Unsanctified’ is equally grisly. On the latter, the percussive thuds are just deadly slaps, with the overall sound being a trip into death metal doldrums, so to speak, and I adore it for its simplistic designs; Filip Garlonta commentating vocally and musically in grotesque manner and conjuring images of foggy graveyards and steaming reanimated corpses.

The trundle of ‘Bringer Of The False Light’ emerges creepily from the gloom and quickens its pace like a grave robber hastily clawing at the soil before anyone notices. The instrumental ‘Perpetual Suffering’ is mere effect, before the impressive cover of Cancer’s ‘Into The Acid’ kicks in. Again, like so many other releases from bands, I’d have preferred another original tune, but as it stands it rounds off what is a fine, fusty and foul debut.

Envenomed Redemption may be as no frills as a bag of old bones, but it’ll keep on rattling until the dead come knocking. Good, gruesome stuff.

Neil Arnold

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