Glorior Belli

Glorior Belli - Evil Archaic Order
Satanic Propaganda Records, 2003
Genre: Black Metal

1. Evil Archaic Order
2. Eternal Torments
3. Black Procession











Glorior Belli are hailing out of France and this is their rather impressive debut.  Unfortunately we only get three songs for this and I would have preferred to hear more.  This actually isn't as poorly recorded as I've heard from most demos out there.  There are some issues with the mix, such as the drums are a little too loud making the guitars feel a bit too far away, but we expect such things when listening to demo material from cassette's.

I feel the guitars are fairly well arranged.  Infestuus tried to give us a rather interesting arrangement where two guitars would play off of each other.  He really nailed some dark atmosphere in "Black Procession" and that is by far my favorite song on this demo.  I feel like they are going for something akin to early Deathspell Omega and for the time this demo came out that was still a fairly fresh approach to Black Metal.  Unfortunately I feel like the guitar arrangements aren't as interesting, I feel they could become as interesting on future releases, but it's not quite there yet.  Glorior Belli is clearly still developing their art into something even more sinister.  The vocals are probably another aspect that will stand out for this group.  Infestuus uses a strange guttural rasp that almost borders on being Death Metal... but it's not quite growl oriented enough to qualify for that!  It's something somewhat different, but it seems to work alright for Glorior Belli.

The booklet is pro-printed and has a rather eye-catching cover.  It looks like a painting trying to portray something from the Crusades.  I also like some of the graphic design on part of the booklet, the only thing I don't like is that the booklet's interior is blank.  If you're going to make a tape booklet that folds out, at least print something on the interior!  I hate it when things are published like this.

At this point, I'm not sure if I would say people need to rush out and hear this demo.  It looks like only one of the songs made it onto their debut album with "Eternal Torments" and this wasn't the most interesting on the demo.  Either way, here begins Glorior Belli's career and it looks like it might be promising.