Review Summary: Everybody has to start somewhere, but that doesn't mean the world has to hear it.
I think it's safe to assume that just about every musician whose output you devour started out writing useless, unbearable crap and playing in a fantastically sloppy manner that would send the other kind of chills down your back. Fortunately, just about every instance of this act of coming to terms with music doesn't get documented on a transferable medium, and the ears of innocent passers-by get spared from having to endure Baby's First Musical Endeavor. Unfortunately, in some cases, the newbie musician isn't aware just how dreadful his display is, and his craptastic rendition of his “masterpiece” gets unleashed upon the world.
Truth be told, a bunch of current ancient metal purists forget just how much crap drifted around back then, and that for a demo to float around on the web nowadays somebody would actually have to decide that it's good. Thus, a lot of really abysmal material gets filtered out from the get-go. However, sometimes the band members themselves decide to take action and dump a shoddy, prehistoric demo onto Mikseri. This was the case with Ater, a Finnish death metal ensemble from some little middle of nowhere, that dropped two demos in the early nineties before falling off the face of the Earth. It seems that not everybody in the Ater camp forgot about their musical excursion, as the band has a vintage nineties-style Tripod official site and the aforementioned Mikseri page with both the demos on there.
The first outing, aptly titled The Black Abyss, showcases a band that only just dipped the tips of its toes into the formative stage proper. In other words – the music featured within is some of the worst tripe to ever carry the death metal label and doesn't have that much in common with death metal, apart from the fact that the vocals are growled. The kids lose no time in introducing their lone musical idea for the demo – the five dollar Casio hanging around the space where they recorded this switches from playing two alternating notes to a phrase of marginal interest, which gets hammered out into the majority of this demo's riffage. They ineptly change a bunch of notes here and there, but the overall idea stays the same.
When they're not aping the intro theme, Ater's busy churning out heavily foreseeable power chord patterns that must have sounded dated back in 1992, let alone now. Rhythmic variation is unheard of, adequate harmony is a dream, just about every riff on here ends up sounding like the writer just discovered that he can move the fifth up and down the neck and it sounds effin bitchen, at least to his ear. And, to make things worse, the band didn't even think of abandoning standard tuning! It is a known fact of nature that just about everything sounds heavier and a little less crappy when you drop your guitar by a fourth or a fifth, but Ater stays true to the pitches their strings had when they first picked up the G chord.
But wait! There's more! Ater realized that a demo full of disjointed power chord strumming with various degrees of right-hand intensity must be dull on the listener, so they decided to incorporate some progressively harmonized melodies, which is a very patronizing euphemism for the sprawling cacophony they add in places. There's good dissonance and there's bad dissonance, contrary to the belief of the more aurally tamed side of the fence slapping together some rag-tag random notes won't cut it as the kind of dissonance that one can actually listen to and enjoy. Now, give the quest of writing some dissonant melodies to a bunch of newcomers with no visible songwriting traits... yep, you guessed it, the results are so devastatingly awful that the power chords' imminent return is welcomed with relief and something resembling joy. Try catching your arch nemesis, tying him to a post, and looping that “badass” part from “Rotting”. You will know which part I mean if you ever decide to peruse that song.
Some of the above faults may have been ameliorated by an invigorating performance, but there's none of that in sight either. Once again, the kids don't lose any time in showing off just how great the demo is going to be – the first riff from “When Redeemer Wept” was such a good take that they didn't want to spoil the magic, and left the fantastic display of one of the guitar players clinging on to the drums for dear life for everybody to hear. It's obvious that the band is underrehearsed or encountering severe studio stress when such a simple riff poses problems. More nuggets like that are present throughout the demo, but Ater did their best to play through their material in a proper fashion – no epic botching in sight, just some failed timing or pick blooper here and there. To make matters worse, one of the guitar players forgot his distortion pedal on the way to the studio, and Carlos Santana serves up a more punishing tone than that guy. The performance is far from godly, and the best part of the deal is the drummer. I don't get to say that every day.
With all that said, I just can't comprehend why Ater would willingly circulate this mess almost 20 years after its inception. Especially when one considers they actually recorded a superior follow up – Ors expands their musical vocabulary a bit, and whilst the band clings onto newly introduced acoustic guitars too much, their riffs start sounding a little more like riffs and songs start looking a little more like songs, with the band starting to show potential (which is nowhere to be found on The Black Abyss) and leaving me wondering after how many additional demos they would have coughed up something genuinely good, had they not broken up. Still, considering that someone in the band thought it would be a good idea to circulate this standard-tuned random power chord workout laced with horrible, horrible dissonant breaks years later, my wishful thinking becomes a bit more realistic.
