FRESH MEAT
Italian Beherit devotees uncover their own mystic path
Demonomancy, Spite, Whipstriker.
Having taken their moniker from a Beherit demo, it came as no surprise that Demonomancy’s 2013 debut album, Throne Of Demonic Proselytism – and subsequent split with Witchcraft (not the Swedish retro-doomsters but a Finnish entity of the same name) – was firmly rooted in the Drawing Down the Moon tradition: proving barbaric yet eerie at the same time.
“That name always had a deeper meaning for us,” clarifies Witches Whipping, the Italian band’s vocalist, guitarist and sole remaining original member. “It portrays our relationship with our art extremely well. It’s as if this brutal music’s surreal, occult and abominable themes were a gateway to better comprehend ourselves and the meaning of life itself, a concept that has a lot in common with the ritual of demonomantic divination anyway.”
But then, something happened on the way to the battlefield. A few years later, and with a renewal of two-thirds of their line-up, new album Poisoned Atonement sees Demonomancy taking a slight left turn, albeit in a similar, FOAD fashion.
“Although it was released in 2016 after the two new guys had been drafted already, that Witchcraft split was actually recorded by the old line-up and it includes one original song that was quite pivotal for us,” Witches Whipping explains. “We had been experiencing a lengthy writer’s block for almost three and a half years, as we had a very hard time visualising how Demonomancy could be different from the Throne… era. But we’d been talking about doing a split with Witchcraft for a long time, so that actually gave us the motivation we needed to really move forward and this marked the beginning of a new, more positive state of mind. In the end, Poisoned Atonement was written in
“The occult is a key to the meaning of life’
WITCHES WHIPPING
about 18 months, as if a river of creativity was finally violently overflowing the dams that were keeping it down.”
The arrival of both a new “resourceful” drummer, Herald Of The Outer Realm, who could also do vocals and A. Cutthroat, a bass player with a more classic heavy/speed metal background (Vesper, Demon Bell) urged them to follow a surprising and more ‘fist in the air’ direction, with a song like The Day Of The Lord daring using a near-singalong, repetitive and anthemic chorus.
“I have always seen our music as an extreme version of heavy metal as opposed to ‘war metal’ – a label I have always hated to see attached to my band,” says the frontman. ‘The defining factor is that I grew up listening to a lot of thrash metal, so even when I discovered bands like Blasphemy, Archgoat or Profanatica, I also loved classic acts like Cirith Ungol, Manilla Road and Angel Witch. I’m glad you’ve picked up on The Day Of The Lord, as this is probably my favourite track. There are so many sides to it, like blastbeats merging with an epic yet ominous atmosphere and, for the first time, a melodic yet minimalistic solo. Overall, I guess that what has changed now is that we managed to allow all our influences to come to the surface and merge into a formula that is truly ours.”