Dusting Off a Cassette Pt. 15: Dawn of Azazel: Vita Est Militia Super Terram

This is Dawn of Azazel's second demo. The band had a strong reaction to their first demo, but this is the one that really put things together for the band from a musical standpoint. By this point, Dawn of Azazel's sound had pretty much already been polished. By polished, I mean that the extremely chaotic nature of their music had been discovered and put to good use. Dawn of Azazel's music sounds like the theme to the most destructive battlefield in history.

Three of the four tracks on this cassette would appear on their first full length album, while the fourth appeared as the title track on the Bloodforged Abdication 7" single. The vocals are not real fleshed out yet, but it is very clearly the same band that recorded the next few albums. Rigel Walshe's inhuman shrieks are present, but not as pronounced in the music as they would become in the band's full-lengths. The production is surprisingly good for a demo as well, a little flat but that is to be expected on a self-released demo tape.

Dawn of Azazel has always gotten by on its riff style which is brutal, jagged, and unrelenting. The band has always been powerful as shown by this demo. The riffs show a strong influence from bands like Blasphemy and other "war metal" bands, blending a seemless mixture of death, thrash, and black metal. The drums pummel the listener's ears and are extremely raw. Sometimes the drums can't quite keep up with the riffs and lose time, but this just adds to the uneasy chaos of the music.

The songs are surprisingly catchy. It is very easy to distinguish from one track to the other which is not the case in a lot of other bands. I can only imagine the kind of live show this band performs.

This demo only gets points off because of its rough sound and incompleteness of the songs. Otherwise it is a good representation of the band in its early stages.