Decaying Citadel - Where the Ancient Bones Are Laid To Rest.

This is the first demo of New Jersey funeral doom band Decaying Citadel. It's a two track demo, lasts about 22 minutes and I fucking love it =D

The first song, Chaos Ivocation starts out with an admittedly horrible intro. It sounds at first like someone just fiddling around with a wannabe doom riff. This lame riff goes on for about 2 and a half minutes, right before you are about to turn it off, it gets amazingly better. Fucking heavy ass chords come in, sludgy and demonic, slow and grinding. Here, it gets good. As you are starting to fall into trance that funeral doom puts you into after a few minutes, the vocals start. The vocals are distant and distorted shreiks, remenicant of Burzum or Xasthur. Now, about seven minutes in, it goes into an even slower riff, throwing you deeper into the atmosphere. The song ends this way. You should have your head just about crushed by now.

The second song starts out with a short melancholic acoustic intro, it's nice and a good change of pace. Afterwards, we have a trippy, slow, bass solo. I caught traces of traditional doom influence in the last song, but here is where it really manifests itself. The guitar chimes in after a minute or so. For some reason, the tone is different than on the first track, but it's a lot better. Deeper, heavier, just a much better tone, louder too. I don't see why he didn't have this tone on the first song, it would have been an improvement. The vocals are a lot more prominent on this one, they are great with the again slow, sludgy and crushing guitars. After a bit, there is a short acousic interlude for some variation. The crushing riffs continue on for a few minutes until another acoustic part, this one a bit longer, with chords. We get a different riff after, this one oozing traditional doom influence. Continues in all it's glory until the end with an acoustic outro.

This demo is amazing, fucking trance-inducing funeral doom, crushing, interesting, varying, absolutely everything you could ask for in a funeral doom release. The intro and tone of the guitar in the first track is the only problem. Other than that, it's perfect.