Back in stock. This double-disc collection reissued a while back by Baphomet Records offers most of the early material from this early U.S. black metal outfit, who were one of the first on these shores alongside Absu, Black Funeral and Judas Iscariot. Demoncy was one of my favorites, with a murky, miasmal strain of atmospheric black metal on those early releases that had a harsher, more isolationist feel than his peers. Primarily the sole project of founding member Ixithra, who at one time also played in Profanatica as well as recording various death industrial and dark ambient albums under the names Profane Grace, Mysterian and Raven's Bane, Demoncy sounded like something that had just been dug out of an ancient, rotted cellar; while the project's sound would evolve and become more polished over time, these early, low-fi, dissonant blasts of evil black metal remain my favorite stuff of theirs.

Demoncy's Faustian Dawn demo still kills more than twenty years later, though modern listeners might find this early stuff to be little more than a blast of low-fidelity noise. It's certainly raw, and supremely oppressive, the music screaming out of the abyss in a rush of hypnotic blastbeats and bizarre vocals that seem to be simultaneously guttural and whispered, the guitar parts simple and repetitive and trance-inducing, occasionally offset by sudden shifts into slower, sludgy heaviness. Sort of comparable to what Beherit was doing early on, with a similarly primitive and fucked-up vibe and a tendency to throw in some eerie experimental synths, atmospheric instrumental guitar and backwards vocals on the book ending tracks, or belt out a thrashing, scum-encrusted punk riff over a pummeling D-beat, but Ixithra also scattered some surprisingly melodic riffs in here as well. The other tracks that round out this first disc are taken from rehearsal recordings from 1995-1996, and mostly make up material that would eventually appear of Demoncy's debut album Within The Sylvan Realms Of Frost.

That album is the centerpiece of the second disc, a six-song Lp that's one of my favorite American black metal albums from this era. Demoncy's sound had gotten a little more polished and refined by this point, as those rehearsal demos showed, but Frost retained that noisy, saturated distortion and gravelly production, keeping it evil and abrasive. The savagery of that early stuff hadn't been too diminished either, these new songs deliver more of those simple, violent riffs and sweeping ominous scales and frost-charred leads, but there's also the occasional left turn like the borderline poppy hook that shows up on "Abysmal Shores Of The Dark Lands Beyond The Sun", or the dreamy keyboards that drift over some of the tracks like something from a heat-warped Badalamenti soundtrack cassette. And Ixithra slows it down to a monstrous, crumbling dirge every once in a while, where the keyboards take on a low, rumbling distorted sound. It's a killer combination, the sound of a classical heavy metal aesthetic churning within a storm of droning distortion, an epic treble-cranked night-trance that's been mimicked by countless black metal outfits ever since, and still some of the best USBM to come out of the late 90s. The other remaining seven tracks on the disc comprise excerpts from Demoncy's 1994 Hypocrisy Of The Accursed Heavens demo and 1995's Ascension Of A Star Long Since Fallen demo, both of which are in the band's earlier, noisier style of Beherit-esque madness.