Le Mond Mort Records, 1999
Genre: Black Metal
Promo 1994:
1. My Satanic Hatred
2. Those Dark Desires that Torment My Soul
Feasts:
3. Deadsex
4. Fresh Flesh
5. The Last Supper
6. Tower of Tortured Ones
7. Interlude
8. Charnel
Those Dark Desires that Torment My Soul:
9. Those Dark Desires that Torment My Soul
Giving up on tracking down an actual copy of these demos I've resorted to seeing if the bootleg market had anything, since it doesn't seem Drakkar is going to be releasing the Black Murder material anytime soon. I came across this old CD-R version which compiled all the Black Murder material on a single release. They actually did a pretty good job putting this together. The transfer of the original material came out fairly well.
The major reason I wanted this wasn't for the 1994 demo, but for their 1995 demo called "Feasts". Where the first demo kind of fell flat, "Feasts" is really quite excellent! I don't know what happened between the first demo and this one, but they really got their recording quality under control and the drums are much better this time around. Black Murder have managed to put together some very dark and moody sounding Black Metal with really excellent atmosphere. It has this strange disturbing dissonant quality underlying a lot of the songs. This is one of the reasons I think LLN had a pretty large impact on the French Black Metal scene, because a large portion of the Black Metal bands following in the footsteps of these projects often like to play around with similar layers of dissonant riffing. It has a bizarre twisted feel to it that you can't really find in too many other places. The final song on here is a re-recording of a song originally found on "Promo 1994" and what a huge difference the production makes. In this recording you can actually tell the song was actually pretty decent.
In the end "Feasts" is really the release that makes Black Murder worthwhile and I would really love to see Drakkar re-release the material in full. They're re-releasing so much of the other LLN stuff, that I would love to see this one get out there. It beats having all kinds of stupid poorly ripped bootlegs out there. I'd certainly by an official copy of the Black Murder material. Maybe someday...
Self-released, 1994
Genre: Black Metal
1. My Satanic Hatred
2. Those Dark Desires that Torment My Soul
I've enjoyed raw Black Metal for quite some time and there are few projects out there even remotely as raw as what the groups in the Les Légions Noire were putting out. Black Murder is one of the massive amount of side projects. It was never a main project, but it did release a couple great demos. The first release was only a two song demo. I feel like these guys got together and just wrote music and if it didn't fit with a current project they made up a new one and here we have Black Murder as a result. As you can tell by the cover of my tape, it's not a real copy, I definitely have a bootleg. I do have some real LLN releases, but this isn't one of them.
Like many of the LLN projects it's a rather sloppy foray into somewhat haphazard Black Metal. Some of the riffs and atmosphere are really interesting, but sometimes things are just inaudible and then the drums just get sloppy. In "My Satanic Hatred" I want to assume whoever is playing drums is stopping frequently because they can no longer hear the music. Despite all this noise, they do come up with some pretty solid ideas. The acoustic aspects in "Those Dark Desires that Torment My Soul" worked really well.
Overall the first demo is almost too much of a mess to be truly enjoyable. The drums are extremely sloppy and even the "blast beats" just sound ridiculous. The first Black Murder promo is probably a miss for me, a few good ideas on here can't carry the tape very far.
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