Year: 1992/2025
Label: Misantropia Records

We’re going about this a bit backwards, reviewing first Polish black metal legend Graveland’s third demo and turning our gaze now to the first and second demos. Honestly, we could come up with some fancy and almost believable reason, but the truth is simple. When queuing these up for review, we (the royal we makes a return) just looked at the catalogue numbers. This is MISA27, Drunemeton (reviewed here) MISA26. And that’s that.

But it does make sense, really. As we wrote in our review of Drunemeton, Graveland’s third demo saw the music start to approximate the raw, atmospheric black metal the band would become legendary for. On these early releases, things get really weird. It makes sense to explore them in reverse just because of how alien and weird Necromanteion, the first demo, and Promo Tape ’92, which is also included on this CD, sound.

I mean, is this even black metal? Not by any conventional standards; perhaps not in any other way than by association. This doesn’t sound anything like the second wave of black metal Graveland would help formulate. But there’s also nothing here that’s reminiscent of first wave black metal. This is something entirely left field.

How left field? Well, more than one reviewer on Metal Archives, for example, calls this industrial metal. It’s not, but that should sufficiently prove this is pretty weird stuff.

On these demos, Graveland’s expression consists of mid-tempo songs, where a cheap sounding drum machine hammers out a very bare bones beat. The guitar belts out shoddy, crude and straightforward chugga-chugga riffs, and synths mostly add just weird effects. Rob Darken‘s vocals are a frog-like, weird guttural croak.

And whilst I don’t agree that this is industrial metal, I do sort of get the association. There’s this machinized feel to it all. The repetitive, stripped down beat; the monotonous riffing; the weird synths.

Honestly, these early demos are not good. Where Drunemeton had a certain “buried potential” kind of appeal to it, and had some nascent elements of what was to come, Necromanteion presents music that is entirely unrecognizable as Graveland. And which is not very good.

Of course, again: context is king, as we ascertained in our review of Drunemeton. These early demos were recorded in 1992 in Poland. There were precious few other contemporary black metal releases to draw inspiration from. The equipment must have been decidedly crude and primitive. The shoddy sound and baffling musical stylings are understandable from that viewpoint.

Still. These are not good releases. That fact remains. However, from a sort of “cultural” viewpoint, this release justifies its existence in the same way as Drunemeton’s re-release. These are the embryonic, nascent first stages of what was to become one of the greatest, even if often criminally overlooked, black metal legends. Listening to Necromanteion and Drunemeton, and then comparing them to the releases just after them is almost revelatory. They outline the rocky path the pioneers of second wave black metal had to travel on to arrive at the sound that would change the world of metal massively.

Necromanteion is a release one can only recommend to people who like to indulge in such archaeology as outlined above. The historical/cultural context is interesting – but even so, this is some rough shit to sit through.

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