I always enjoy hearing from bands from the further flung corners of the earth, as they often bring a unique flavour to their music. And just one such band is CONCATENATUS, a band from Chile formed just last year, offering up their very first demo "Meditation Through the Inner Vortex". This title already aroused the first inklings of trepidation: in my experience, such album names are a portent either of terrible music that tries to be pretentious, or of music that only makes sense after the ingestion of copious amounts of not-so-legal substances. Featuring an intro and two songs with a combined playtime of just over a quarter of an hour, this demo unfortunately proved my instincts right, falling firmly into the former category of neigh ostentatious drivel.

The intro comprises of the rattling of chains overlaid with Tibetan throat singing, and which leads directly into "Unreachable Dawn". Here, despairingly wailed vocals amalgamate with a simple repetitive riff and lack-lustre drumming. Now I get that independent bands that are just starting out often struggle to get decent recording equipment, but the vocals especially have a hollow and flat sound that makes it seem that they were recorded in a cave. Granted, this does allow the music to sound rawer than a vegan's worst nightmare, but it also means that the drums and guitars overpower the vocals, giving the song an imbalanced feel. The final song "Echoing Cacophony" is exactly that. The wailing vocal style adopted in the previous song degenerates into whining dribble that is occasionally countered by harsher rasped vocals and throat singing. I normally love it when a band can incorporate so many styles together, as this often adds astounding new facets to the music. This might have been the case with CONCATENATUS, but the vocals seem to be haphazardly thrown all over the song. In this case, less would have been more. The songs could have been much better had the vocals been used to complement the instruments, rather than drench them completely. Conversely, it would have also been nice to see the instruments deviate more from their repetitive mid-tempo structure. The song ends off with the same throat singing and chain rattling from the intro, bringing the demo round full circle.

However, despite these flaws, CONCATENATUS does show some promise. If they manage to add more flair to the instrumental sections and use the vocals more sparingly, then they certainly could grow to be a band worth keeping an eye on.