#self-released

The musicianship and production values on display throughout both releases raise questions about how we should understand IV as demo material. Ayloss (stage name of Chris Daritsis, who has at least a half dozen other metal projects going and plays just about every note of the music he releases as Spectral Lore) is stretching himself, musically and compositionally, on IV, incorporating ambitiously proggy keyboards and horns into the band’s already grand and dense atmospheric black metal. The results are mixed, but the music feels very polished and complex, not qualities commonly associated with demo-level recordings.

The progressive elements are particularly emphatic in the release’s initial 20 minutes, and this reviewer is not moved. Demo opener “On the Threshold That Separates Two Worlds” sounds like a mash-up of Tangerine Dream’s electronic sensibility and the overheated grandiosity of Trevor Jones’ Excalibur soundtrack. “Desert of the Real (The Expanse)” recalls the fussiest sorts of late-1970s fusion; it’s all a bit mannerly and self-regarding, and the addition of conventional black metal textures collapses the song into risible dramatics. Still, the eruption of “Chaos Is a Grand Adventure” into the soundscape is nearly worth the wait. The song recalls the force of Sentinel (2012), perhaps the band’s most aggro release, and most of IV (Part 2-Demo) gravitates toward the black metal that has dominated Spectral Lore’s considerable output.

At the close of the demo, Ayloss departs more profoundly from his genre roots. “What could have been, the burden of here and now, deathless” is a 17+-minute track that commences in an indie mode. A little Johnny Marr, a little Sisters of Mercy, a little Aztec Camera, the first four minutes of the song are fairly pleasant. Soon a repetition of the principal melodic line commences, all languid strumming and gentle electronics; the strum overstays its welcome by at least two minutes, and the track threatens to fall into a stupor. This reviewer did.

Then, after about five additional (and interminable) minutes of clean strings and digital effects gesturing toward ambient music, an assertive voice emerges. It’s a recording of Mario Savio, delivering one of the climaxes of his 2 December 1964 address during the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and what a speech that was. Savio paraphrases Bayard Rustin. It’s stirring. Soon Ayloss mixes in other voices from contemporary speeches on Gaza and the genocide. It’s hard to tell what the intent is: validation of an ongoing leftist tradition of dissent? Sadness that these voices are not more prominent in our political discourse?

Perhaps the strange combination of sounds, musical modalities and sensibilities, the decidedly uneven success of the songs — perhaps these are the way to understand the demo quality of the release. Ayloss seems to be woodshopping in a very public way. It’s hard to argue with so much free music, and with the concept of freedom (of speech, of culture, of creativity) that may be driving all the experimentation. But this reviewer believes there is a good record in all this sometimes baggy and saggy output. It’s a record he would like to hear.