Four-man symphony squad INDIKON, has arrived directly from their Italian home grounds with their five-track demo "Nemesi" and mamma-mia! That's a spicy meatball (I had to). Recent press releases reveal items of topic such as man's creations and, equally, man's destructions, tucked in with a side of mythological and current events, all to be those of consistent and perpetual inspiration for the band's writings.

As somebody who can genuinely declare symphonic metal, in all its sub-categories, to be that of their preferred kind, I am completely disappointed by this demo-and thank God this release has been termed just that: a demo. I don't think I could rate this if it was categorized as anything else. How completely let down I am by the shockingly low level of production quality on this. I had to go online and double check this wasn't something that rode shotgun in a DeLorean from the mid-'90s and climbed its way through a worm hole, all to end up on Metal's doorstep just five months ago.

Titles such as "Syrian" and "The Land of Fires" each display such a compressed, bottled-up sound quality that stems not only from the music as a whole, but down to each instrument individually. I don't know what's worse; the 8-bit sounding guitar work, the hiccupping drum rhythms, or the fact that at various stages throughout these pieces, there are simply too many instruments and samples playing at once, each saturating and drowning out one another. I didn't have a clue what I was listening to. Furthermore, it made the songs incredibly difficult to dissect, musically, because I kept losing attention.

Overall, this was a difficult one for me. Mainly because in my reviews I tend to individually pull up members of a group, detail what I find to be their strongest and weakest points musically, then rate their performance as a whole. INDIKON'S "Nemesi" has made it utterly impossible for me to do that. I truly love symphonic metal. I believe it paints pictures and adds atmospheres that no other genres do. I don't know what's gone wrong with these guys. Absolutely unimpressed!<