The Industrial Twilight: Crown of Asteria

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Crown of Asteria - "Demo MMXIII" [2013]

Artist: Crown of Asteria

Title: Demo MMXIII

Genre: Atmospheric Black Metal

Country: USA
Year: 2013

Track List:

Hymn of the Northern Bowers
Beneath the Boreal Twilight
Ascendancy of the Stars
Through the Birch and Beyond the Lakes

Here's the first demo recording by Crown of Asteria, an one-woman black metal project that has appeared on my blog before, which I decided to check out because of this review:

One-woman black metal from the vast frozen northlands of...Michigan, but with a really nice foresty photo on the cover, nature-themed song titles that go beyond the genre standards to sound really enticing and track lengths that scream long-winded but powerfully epic.

The demo starts exactly as you'd hope, with some calm acoustic strumming that brings to mind things like Ulver's Kveldssanger. And just as it gets going, BOOM. The shittiest, most heinously inappropriately programmed blastbeating drum machine charges its way in, crushing that acoustic guitar riff before it even knew what was happening. It literally cuts the riff off and shits all over everything. It's like a conclave of elves in a pine forest clearing slowly starting their homage to the stars above with soft strumming of their lutes before the angelic voices and cascading strings and harps comes in to take everything to a higher plane of existence, then a hippopotamus strolls in and takes a massive shit on all the elves. Ever seen a hippopotamus take a shit? Look it up on YouTube.

That's definitely one of the funniest metal album reviews I've ever read, and while being quite unflattering, it's surprisingly accurate. That said, this demo isn't nearly as bad as you might have though after reading the passage above, and while I wouldn't recommend it to those unfamiliar with Meghan Wood's music (her discography is quite large with a lot of releases to choose from), it still was a quite enjoyable listen for me.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About this blog

I created this blog mostly because I wanted to practise my English skills, and to showcase the industrial, gothic, punk, metal, neofolk and progressive rock scene of Russia/ex-USSR and Eastern Europe (especially Hungary) in the meanwhile.

As you can see, this blog doesn't take itself seriously enough, but I hope I'm doing good enough with my reviews even if my proficiency in English is limited. Along with the aforementioned stuff from Eastern Europe, I occasionally post some classic and rare albums that aren't to be missed, and generally whatever I want. Other categories of note:

* finno-ugric rarities - various music (including pop) in minor Finno-Ugric languages which I'm interested in because of my heritage. The music from Hungary, Finland and Estonia can be found under the respective categories;

* lo-fi - various poorly recorded demos from before 2000 that are of historical importance. Most of these demos come from the USSR era, so you might want to check out the USSR category as well.

As of now, I try to post only music that has already been made free by the artists themselves, or the rare old releases that are out of print. But if you're an artist and would like me to remove the download links of your work, just contact me using the form below.

Sorry, I don't do reviews by request, I don't have the time. Moreover, I think the bands that feel the need to advertise themselves by sending their demos to as many blogs as possible are usually just plain boring. If you want to contact me for any other reason, use the contact form below.

It should be obvious enough that reviewing anything on here doesn't equals endorsement of artists' personal views. This especially concerns neofolk and martial industrial. It'd be fair enough to say that I have the same approach to the political and religious topics in these genres as Laibach do.

Many of the female musicians featured on my blog are amateur models, and in many cases their modelling work is no less interesting than their music. Right now I'm working on giving it a separate section of the blog (just in case if anyone wants my review to be only about their music and not their looks). The work is in progress, check back later if you're interested.

The title of my blog comes from a song by The Kovenant (album "SETI", 2003).