SOB A LUA DO BODE / DEMONIAC VENGEANCE

Sob A Lua Do Bode / Demoniac Vengeance is a split LP release from German black metal act Moonblood and French black metal act Deathspell Omega. The original LP is limited to 350 hand-numbered copies, so this is an extremely rare release. The album has since been bootlegged on CD by Black Mass Organisation. The CD release is illigal and not approved by the artists. In fact Moonblood has never released anything on CD. Only Vinyl and cassette releases. The album has seven songs. The first four is Moonblood songs while the last three are Deathspell Omega songs. The Deathspell Omega songs appear as the first three songs on the bootleg CD release.

The music on the Moonblood songs were already recorded in 1997 and were intented for a split LP release with Greek act Adhill. This never happened and the songs found their way into this release instead. All four songs are in old school black metal style. Lots of blasting drumming, noisy and primitive production, rather primitive distorted guitar riffs and raspy vocals. The same can be said about the Deathspell Omega songs. The only difference is that Deathspell Omega appear to be better musicians. Their interplay is more tight than the amateurish playing of Moonblood.

The production is absolutely awful on the songs from both bands. Raw and primitive demo like productions that sounds like they were made in a rehearsal room with bad acoustics. Productions like this is an aquired taste for sure and I know people who really enjoy these primitive productions because they feel that the raw sound quality earns the music more justice than a more polished production could do. I must say that I totally disagree and therefore I used the term awful above. I believe that there is a middle road that sounds so much more rewarding IMO.

I don´t own Sob A Lua Do Bode / Demoniac Vengeance and I´ve loaned it from a friend who is a black metal fanatic/ collector. I acknowledge that there is something mystical and intriguing in sitting with an LP that´s hand-numbered and knowing that there are only 350 copies made. But on the other hand I think that the quality of music on this release is so low that it doesn´t deserve more than a 1 star rating. This album is only recommended to the all eating old school black metal freak and even in that genre I´ve heard much better releases than this one.