Stepping into the Atomic Chamber

Baroque, Bleak, Brutal, where it's 1349, all the time. The black metallers added the track "Atomic Chamber" from Demonoir to their MySpace page and because I must experience the future as soon as possible - even in its shitty, over-compressed form - I went to check it out (twice, actually: you have to be sure about these things) and over all, I'm pretty impressed: this track manages to find a happy medium between Hellfire and Revelations of the Black Flame: there's plenty of pounding, there's some (slightly) more atmospheric stuff, and there's a decent amount of structure that keeps a six minute song sounding like a six minute song and not an endless assault. Things manage to get a little melodic at one point, I swear I could hear the presence of a bass track, and Frost gets a special call out for being a living metronome on a high-speed setting.

Still, I'm sticking with cautious optimism rather than all-out excitement about Demonoir: there are a few things about this song - like the off-tempo piano counterpoint in the middle of the song and Ravn slowly repeating "atomic chamber" at the end - that don't sit quite right. Time will tell if these are aberrations, or a symptoms of a band trying too hard to break boundaries while sounding kvlt.