Demilich – 20th Adversary Of Emptiness (2014)

April 4, 2020

Today was a good day, for today was the day I decided to sit down and play through the entire Demilich discography. Thankfully, these days the entire task has been made painfully easy thanks to the release entitled 20th Adversary of Emptiness, which not only remasters the essential Nespithe record, but the entire gamut of demos too. 

I first heard of Demilich when they were announced for Netherlands Death Fest in 2016 (I missed them at the fest itself because I’m an idiot), but at the time I had no idea how amazing their only full length album was. Nespithe is a glorious and puzzlingly morbid foray into the infinite bowels of creature feature death metal. Imagine Bill Steer joining Disembowelment instead of Carcass. There is something meaty and terrifying about the noises that Nespithe conjures up, and the fairly recent remaster from the original tape makes the record sound alive.

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3m9t2ness Of Van2s1ing and V34ish6ng Of Emptiness are two records that then bring together the rest of Demilich’s original tape demos. There are 5 sessions here, of which you can go onto Discogs and obsess over the original formats, but the sessions vary in length and in quality and often songs will show up on more than one session. In the case of the remaster, the quality tends to degrade as the listen progresses, leaving the more hard to find unpolished stuff right at the end.