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One of the weirder sounding death metal reissues to come out on Nuclear War Now, the Black Death Cult collection assembles three of the rare demos from the obscure and short-lived Canadian band Cremation, comprising a brief but mind-bending body of work that is easily among the strangest and most mutant sounding bands to emerge from the legendary "Ross Bay Cult" in Vancouver. Formed by infamous drummer/madman J. Read (Revenge / Axis Of Advance / Blood Revolt / Conqueror / Kerasphorus) back at the dawn of the 90's, Cremation dealt in an obviously old-school strain of blackened death metal that was possessed with a similar sort of confusional chaos as Read's other bands, but these songs are far more fractured-sounding, strange and intensely mangled blasts of down-tuned discordant heaviness, the detuned death metal riffs super murky and deformed, the songs lurching and sputtering as the band slowly unfolds their grisly, abysmal heaviness. The vocals are more a series of weird animalistic cries and howls layered with the deep death-grunts, creepy whispered vocals and vomitous gasps that are sometimes all layered together at the same time to extremely creepy effect, and the music is smeared with weird guitar noise and scraped strings, with some additional bits of abstract black ambience adding to the gnarled, monstrous sound of Cremation's twisted death metal. And as always, Read's drumming is astounding, sending his hyper-kinetic, highly technical rhythms spinning off into a myriad of different directions, laying out these ridiculously complex time signatures and continuously evolving blastbeat patterns beneath the churning riffage and hideous discordance. This collection contains the band's 1993 demo Pire Gah Hoath Raclir Od Ialpor, 1994's Hail The Rise Of Med Pe Gal (which also happens to feature Harlow MacFarlane of Funerary Call / Sistrenatus on bass) and 1995's The Flames Of An Elite Age, and while this band doesn't sound quite like anything else in his discography, anyone who's into J. Read's ultra-violent body of work needs to check this terrifically warped outfit out. As far as comparisons go, the Cremation demos are closer in spirit to the weird skronk-infested death metal of Gorguts's Obscura and the bizarre counter-intuitive convulsions of Timeghoul's Tumultuous Travelings demo, but this is ultimately a pretty unique slab of Ross Bay weirdness that was way ahead of its time.