Demise – De la Manipulación A la Ignorancia (Guerrilla Metal RETURNS)
Anything from South America that is metal and has at least one mask-wearing member I like to now call “Guerrilla Metal,” because I feel like I’m soaking in a jungle and being shot upon by many machine guns. And I just can’t get enough of all of these bands referring to their following as “hordas.” Maybe it’s the masks, or the machine guns I imagine they walk around with, I don’t know, somehow any such band is pretty easy to get into. So here we have Demise, from Venezuela, and we have some great-looking spear monster thing by John Quevedo Janssens. A seasoned lot here, they’ve been around for over 20 years people, but their output is rather bizarre. In spite of forming in the early 1990s, their first release was apparently a live cut from 1997, and their first proper full-length, Mode: Terror, didn’t drop until 2009. Curious.
Or maybe not. We’ve heard all about Venezuela. Yeah, yeah, fake news, but quoting a former student of mine, whose family fled the country as refugees, it is a “shit hole” and there are “grenades flying outside of your window.” Thus, it’s not an environment conducive to publishing really any music, let alone living, but hey, for underground metal smash, it’s probably a fine location. And Demise, well, they do it well, let us say, in spite of whatever they deal with down there. If I lived in Venezuela, and had to deal with flying grenades, this would be my soundtrack. De la Manipulación A la Ignorancia, as a whole, is death metal typically defined. However, with that South American, steamy-jungle quality, Demise do it better than most. This just barely made it past being apocrypha, were it not for the solid playing. The riff run shortly after the 2:00 mark on “Rostros de Gaza,” for example, could be placed on repeat and you’ll finally decide to buy that machine gun you’ve been thinking about. It will make you want to live in a jungle, own that machine gun, in a jungle, and then spray bullets at the jungle, just to watch trees fall. Hard to go wrong with that.
Written by Stanley, Devourer of Souls
Demise – De la Manipulación A la Ignorancia
Brutal Records, Extreme Gore Productions
4 / 5
