Production: These are demos nicely remastered with a decent CD pressing that transcends most limitations of previous ultra-low-end or incomplete recording practices.
Review: Tracing the vein of development through the evolution of this famed Greek black metal band who were at their peak a mystical, romantic and often esoteric collection of ideas so abundant they were not contained in reality but generated fundamentals of a now-recognized style.
What distinguished it from the sawing, dissonant black metal blasting of the time was its ability to integrate a range of melodies as part of a narrative song structure and not lose cohesion, mainly through an understanding of rhythm derived from the mighty Slayer and a tonal conceptualization process that, despite its heavy metal roots, seems classically influenced in its use of melody.
Many of the lessons learned between these two demo recordings defined methods of "standard" composition in black metal, now that the ink's drying on all the public recognition it will get (burnt churches. used chromatic melodies. goofy faces.). Here you hear a band mutate from a competent death metal band in a style inspired by early death metal including Death and Swedish-style death metal such as the Finnish band Sentenced, in order to reach a level of atmospheric black metal that took the incipient heavy metal elements of the previous death metal and converted them to pensive, restless, compassionate riffs which converted the music of outright violence into the subtle Satanism of the naturalists, in which evil is the dark nothingness which lurks in the forest. Think about death!, it howls, underneath its youthful desire to break out and rise, through beauty painting the abyss.
For a more clinical description, one would have to associate the first demo with the range of bands who performed early attempts at making meaningful death metal music without losing the inspirational directness of classics like Possessed and Death. Gutteral blow vocals and characteristic muffled-strum riffs alongside ripping speed phrases distinguish the genre, as well as a few outright Death-isms in the bridging style that Slayer inherited from Judas Priest who might've got it from the Beatles for all we know. But the second demo breaks into a deft motion of themes in riffs that works with intense narrative effect, so that one feels immersion in the music: the structural component of atmospheric music, in concert with the fuzzed and spacious production many mistake for incompetent, achieved once succeeds many times in suspending disbelief so that the aspiration in the music and its desire can be communicated.
What in the first lurked, the second articulates, and in such a method as to be immediately recognizable as the style of black metal from the region. Much like Graveland and later Scandinavian attempts like Throne of Ahaz, Varathron works on the principle of an extended and theartical melody that sets its own stage with a sense of tonal and acoustic dynamic as structure to the regulation of mood. Consequently these are lush and immersive listening experiences which escape conditioned isolation to demonstrate through the entranced listener a possibility of mental awareness.