Just a couple of days before typing up this review I was riding public transport through the expensive end of the capital’s retail district, the sort of area where high end shops cluster together to display their wares in a protective huddle against the cheaper High Street brands. Summer fashions were crowding the windows of assorted fashion emporia, and what I noticed was that the summer fashion for men seemed to be tie-dye shirts and floral or pastel shorts, a style that has come and gone in a rotation since I was old enough to recognise such expressions of consumerism. Well, what has that got to do with ‘Tempora Infernalia’, the new LP from US four piece Demon Eye? All will hopefully be revealed.
With song titles like ‘See The Signs’ and ‘In The World, Not Of It’, it would be fair to assume that this may be rock with an occult leaning, and the opening vocals from the album “do you remember when the sky turned black” helps cement the sound, delivered in a style guaranteed to prick up the ears of any Pentagram fan, accompanied by a sound firmly routed in the past, ‘End of Days’ sounding like a long lost Sabbath demo, complete with the warm and fuzzy musical textures that have been a casualty to the ongoing digital loudness war. ‘Listen To The Darkness’ builds on this seventies sound, guitar riffs delivered with an in your face simplicity backed by some massively retro sounding drum beats that sound like they were delivered from the simple kit that was all the likes of Simon Kirke needed to bring the thunder back in the day. Hell, since my brain has flitted into the realms of Free, it is necessary to point out that ‘I’ll Be Creeping’ is not a cover of that venerable classic, even though it does share the same bluesy ancestry, tinged with the heavier proto-metal vibe of Black Widow.
‘See The Signs’ ups the tempo, a faster chugging track that contrasts to the drawn out mysticism of the succeeding ‘Poison Garden’, the swirling lyrics that meander into the realms of the psychedelic being battered to one side halfway through the track by a riff reminiscent of a young Iommi at his most powerful, an extra depth added by some classic twin guitar harmonising. So many classic influences are apparent through the album, from the King Crimson-esque Prog rock guitar progressions of ‘In This World, Not Of It’, to the unpretentious garage rock snarl of ‘Black Winds’, the whole sound threaded throughout the lo-fi diamond in the rough sound of the entire album.
This is an album that will appeal not only to long haired old gits like me, but to the the whole new generation of rock lovers for whom this whole retro sound is new and fresh and a welcome contrast to the over polished and engineered to within an inch of its life sound of so much modern music. So, how does my trip of the first paragraph relate to this album? Well, just because you haven’t encountered something before, doesn’t mean it’s new and original, and just because it isn’t new and wholly original, doesn’t mean for one moment it’s a bad thing. Yes, I love my old Sabbath, Pentagram, Free, Thin Lizzy, and a whole swathe of the old guard of heavy rock, but rather than automatically make me reject bands like Demon Eye like the ageing pseud I could so easily be, it helps me to enjoy a musical sound that excited me as a youngster, and know that a whole new generation will get the chance to do so too.
(7.5/10 Spenny)
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