MANTICORE was a death metal band that hailed from Coevorden the Netherlands. Founded in early 1990, and the band released the demo tape "Cauterize the Church Council". After the band released this demo, they split up and moved out to become members of God Dethroned, and the rest of the members formed the band Altar. The demo was re-mastered by Ted Tringo at the Ancient Way Mastering and was done from the original recordings.

"Cauterize the Church Council" starts out with a vengeance. The heavy bass riffs give the intro of the song a lot of heft. If you have high bass in your car you might blow a speaker with this track. The bass takes over and is center stage through most of the song letting the guitar take a more backseat role. It lends it self to a very interesting sound. The song takes on a very creepy, deep tone because of it. "Tales of a Creature" begins with a heavy guitar riff. The bass is there, in conjunction the two together create a nice riff that makes this song memorable. The vocals are quick guttural licks that break up the songs. Overall the song has a nice consistent thrum throughout. As with the first song the more prominent bass helps the song take on a more emotional tone that is sometimes missing from death metal tracks.

The third song on the track "Psycho Damn" takes on the same method as the previous song. Heavy bass riffs with the guitar playing a more back up role. This song vocals are a constant fast paced string of guttural sounds. At the halfway point the song drops into a more thrash metal riff, that you find yourself headbanging to easily. They break up the track with a strange sound effect that I can't even really place. It seems out of place in the song, like noise in the middle of a good track. The last track on the album "Mal Function" doesn't stray away from the rest of the album. By this point you have come to know what to expect for the album. Heavy bass, fast paced guitars and guttural vocals. This song doesn't disappoint, however by this point the lack of experimentation started to weigh on me. The band found a unique sound with the heavy bass thrums, but then they proceeded to beat you over the head with that sound.

This short demo for MANTICORE is a decent listen. You can definitely tell it is a demo recording because the production value isn't what you would expect from a studio release. I think the band found an interesting sound for the time it was recorded with the heavy deep bass tones throughout the songs. However, I wish they would have experimented more with the sound because by the time the album is over, even though it is a short album, the repetition in that unique sound gets old. It's sad this band split after this demo was cut, it would have been interesting to see where they took their sound if they would have stayed together.