Welcome to Demo:listen, your weekly peek into the future of underground metal. Whether it’s death, black, doom, sludge, grind, thrash, heavy, speed, progressive, stoner, retro, post-, punk/, -core, etc. we’re here to bring you the latest demos from the newest bands. On this week’s Demo:listen we howl through the night with Sarejevo’s Dogman.
Dogman’s demo, In Torment I Die, came out on the Bosnian tape label, The Throat, earlier this month. Among the batch of nine tapes released that day by The Throat, In Torment I Die stood out like a drunken, blood-covered psychopath staggering around in a crowd of solemn black metal acolytes. Featuring a bassist and vocalist called Vincent and a man by the name of Gustav on guitars and drums, Dogman apparently formed out of a mutual obsession with the cult Brazilian black metal band, Sovereign, whose fifth album gave Dogman their name.
“Sovereign, and especially the Dogman record, have always been a huge inspiration to us, hence we [are] . . . showing respect to something that inspires us, in our own way,” explains Vincent. Vincent’s basslines pulse strongly, and with a tense precision, through Dogman’s raging black metal madness. It’s this tension, this brawl between the programmed drums and the spot-on bass vs. the tumultuous guitars and the tangled, dizzying vocals that makes Dogman’s demo such a wild and disorienting listen.The four songs that make up In Torment I Die were written in one day in April of this year, Vincent claims. All four songs represent “insanity . . . Man becoming beast.” And although there are “loads of stray dogs in downtown Sarajevo,” according to Vincent, “Dogman refers more to the alcoholic.” He reiterates: “Dogman . . . is man becoming beast!”
“Vampyric Death,” the preview track posted by the The Throat earlier this month, gives you a good idea what sort of bedlam awaits you on In Torment I Die. But we locked down an exclusive premiere of “Desperation,” the demo’s third track. Vincent agrees, “‘Desperation’ definitely has a sense of tension to it, more so than the other tracks on the demo.” Not only the fastest and blastiest song from Dogman’s debut tape, “Desperation” also boasts some of the demo’s hungrier brain-burrowing riffs. After building up from a mid-paced stomp that resolves with a solo that signs off like an ambulance’s siren, “Desperation” works itself into a rabid frenzy that carries on all the way to its arbitrary death.
But because this is a The Throat release we’re talking about here, you’ll need to buy the tape in order to hear the whole demo. Fear not. The other songs, not to mention the legitimately terrifying intro, make In Torment I Die a worthy, if not mandatory purchase for anyone with a taste for extreme black metal. Meanwhile, although the future of Dogman was ambiguous when we first reached out to Vincent and Gustav, Vincent now informs us that “ideas [are] flowing again,” that he and Gustav “will try to focus on a full length next.”
Check this space next and every Friday for another killer demo.
