Infernal Scourge - Infernal Scourge

\r\nInfernal Scourge is a musical project by Malek Arthas Hijazi. In their/his MyspacePage he inform us that the sound is "black metal blended with gothic, symphonic, orchestral, melodic music. It is black metal with a full dark atmosphere. Taking black metal to a higher level of extreme immure darkness! At the beginning of Infernal Scourge (2004) my style was neoclassical and it gradually shifted to the current melodic black metal". \r\n

\r\n

\r\nComing to the demo itself first of all I don’t really have any important disagreement with Mr. Hijazi, at least concerning the musical direction of his effort. The first track "Secret Sinful Love (Lucifer’s Whore)" lasts about 16 minutes with many changes from mid to fast paced rhythms with melodic guitars, shrieking vocals that sometimes grant space to a gothic clean singing and many diverse keyboard layers from eerie to symphonic and neo-classical. The next song "The Wrath Of God And The Grace Of Babalon" is another long epic journey of 20 minutes with the same dark symphonic atmosphere. "The frozen 25th hour" is a classical instrumental track while the next one is a guitar based cover of Mozart’s "Ronda alla Turka". I have heard in the past a cover with a guitar on this amazing Mozart’s composition with a pure Malmsteen-esque flair (but without the annoying feeling that the latter would probably rise in my ears) and it really left me mouth opened. And I don’t say this is a bad version despite the fact that the guitars maintain a very simplistic playing (you must be totally idiot or psycho to manage to destroy the enchantment of this all time classical composition) but the bad sound of the drums kind of spoil the final result. Nevertheless it’s a cover that someone with uninstructed ears could listen to with much enjoyment. So let’s get to the last track of this demo that really lays far away in terms of the decent quality of the above. Here the sound gets truly bad, the composition itself at times it is rather an highly irritating pile of sound with really bad vocals and a chaotic incoherence between the instruments as if the individual parts were each written for totally different songs. I don’t know what the artist had in mind but this song unfortunately misspent the quality or usefulness of this demo. \r\n

\r\n

\r\nTo sum up, I didn’t get thrilled by this effort and not to say that this man is completely talentless. On the contrary he seems passionate in what he is doing but there are many things that should be really taken care of next time. For example, the sound of the drums which is really weak here and of course the production as well and finally the clean vocals which in my opinion sound awful and they really need to be more worked out. \r\n

\r\n

\r\nVaso Prassa \r\n

\r\n