Serpenthanas is a mysterious act that came crawling forth from the shadows. Dropping out of no where on the Perverse Homage label. These occultists have released a demo of epic proportions. Filled with cold and creative riffs, twisted vocals, and furious drumming, quite the hard hitting release. With raw production and incredibly creative songwriting, its easily one of the more slept on records of last year.
I’ll be honest, going into this, I was expecting just another typical ‘raw lofi BM’ release, with your typical repeating riffs and endless amounts of blast beats. But luckily there’s a lot more in this release than meets the eye. The layers of guitars are hypnotic, they sit one ontop of another to create a very forceful wall of sound that really makes you listen deep to whats being played. There are some wicked sounding guitar solos and riffs, like on the tracks The Night Becomes Eternal or In The Gloom of Evil. They have this old school, Blasphemy style solos. They clearly know what they’re doing here, and the extremely raw production style is very much on purpose, not some stylistic choice for sure. The drums are what really benefit with this style of production. While, yes there are plenty of blast beats to go around, they’re able to change it up, creating impressive fills and toe tapping goodness that honestly gets me hooked. There isn’t so much being said with the vocals per say, but the twisting howls of the damned releasing from what ever tortured soul decided to lend their vocals for this release. Its incredibly fitting and adds to the over all dark and rather mysterious atmosphere they’re building up.
The slower more melodic parts of the album are quite the breath of fresh air. I find that typically these raw acts hide their musical skills (or lack there of) behind the speed they’re playing at, or the incredibly raw and noisy production they use. These guys aren’t afraid of hiding it at all and it shows in their songwriting as each track strikes a perfect balance between diversity in the music at hand and hard hitting simplicity. Its a hard balance to get, but once achieved its a sight to behold. While each track does flow very well into one another, they can also all stand on their own as singles, becoming an even better product once all put together.
This is such an amazing release, and it doesn’t surprise me that they decided to release it on physical releases only. The label, Perverse Homage, still carries their cassettes, with the limited, unspecified numbered run of their vinyl is probably gonna be a hunt for who ever decided to get their hands on the album. But, if you’re a collector of these types of things, I’d highly recommend finding a way to get it. Very much worth the effort to support these kind of unique acts that gets harder and harder every day thanks to the hyper-connectivity of the internet. Being truly anonymous like this requires much effort, especially if they put this much effort in the music at hand.