Yeah, the Black Mark imports that I've been getting for C-Blast are expensive as hell, but I just can't pass on finally stocking all of the available titles from Edge Of Sanity on the label. This Swedish death metal band is one of my favorites, and that goes for their entire discography - their later work is some of the best experimental death metal ever (with albums like Purgatory Afterglow and Crimson ranking as some of the best prog-death albums you'll ever hear), but even their earlier, more primitive death metal fuckin' killed, loaded with crushing riffage, inventive songwriting and seeds of the wild creativity that would continue to sprout throughout their career. The earliest of all of the Edge Of Sanity re-issues on Black Mark is this new picture disc Lp release of their first proper demo Kur-Nu-Gi-A (the name of the underworld in Babylonian mythology), originally released back in 1990 not long after the band first formed. This is the first time that the demo has been re-released in it's entirety, and has been remixed and re-mastered by frontman / mastermind Dan Swano, and man, this sounds pulverizing. Early Edge Of Sanity was pretty firmly set in the black, rotting mold of early Swedish death metal a la Grotesque and Nihilist, playing mostly mid-paced downtuned heaviness spotted with bursts of thrashing terror and descents into doom-ridden passages of crawling chromatic sludge. The offbeat experimentation of their later work is only faintly heard here with some of the quirky leads and the weird keyboard parts that appear alongside some of the jagged, off-time slower riffs, and even a strange appearance of what sounds like a frenzied flute solo that materializes on "The Day Of Maturity", and the closing track "Serenade For The Dead" is a brief electronic instrumental coda of haunting choral synths and 80's soundtrack keyboards. It's meat-and-potatoes death metal played with serious aggression and intensity, but it's from one of the best bands to ever come out of the Swedish death metal underground in my opinion, and this demo is supremely crushing metal that's essential listening for fans interested in the early Swedish scene. In addition, I really think that you've got to listen to all of Edge Of Sanity's releases to really get an appreciation for the wildly creative arc of their evolution, from practitioners of top-notch mausoleum metal to explorers of far-out, goth-tinged avant-death. This picture disc is a very cool-looking (albeit pricey) collector's item that prominently features the ever-popular detail of a skeletal demon casting terror upon the masses from Jan van Eyck's famous Last Judgment tryptich...