Here you get an excellent excavation of the early throes of what is widely considered to be one of the best doom metal bands around right now. I’d be hard pressed to argue. Coming out right on the hells of their terrific second album Four Phantoms, this is a vinyl reissue of the Seattle band's 2011 demo that originally came out on CDR and cassette, now pressed on black vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, featuring a slightly revised layout and a more durable jacket than the previous version that came out from the German label Psychic Assault. The record features four tracks of pure funereal ultra-crush that sprawl out for more than half an hour; soaked in super-atmospheric, achingly beautiful heaviness, Bell Witch's demo has some material that would end up getting reworked for their first album Longing ("Beneath The Mask" and "I Wait"). But then there's also the two tracks that apparently only appeared here, "Mayknow" and ""The Moment", which makes this pretty desirable for those of us infatuated with the duo's brand of crushing, melancholic doom.

     Even as far back as this demo, the team of bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer Adrian Guerra were skillfully utilizing their trademark spare instrumental palette, blending this with their emotive vocals to utterly massive and soul-smashing effect. On the instrumental "Mask", the mournful, low-end notes slowly drift around the samples from Roger Corman's 1964 gothic classic Masque Of The Red Death, opening the demo with dreary, almost Codeine-like slowcore that crawl like the track of tears in sub-zero temperature, before leading straight into the thunderous, bellowing "I Wait". These early versions are just a little more stripped down than how the songs sounded on the album, slightly grittier and more molten in their wall-rattling delivery like one might expect, but just as suffocating heavy.

The exclusive b-side songs, on the other hand, are particularly torturous and harrowing. "Mayknow" is a real standout, a crawling, abject dirge with some of the most terrifying vocals I've ever heard from Bell Witch, but which also spits out some wonderfully moody, almost bluesy guitar leads that creep across the barrage of slow-motion, skull-flattening doom, with the vocals rising in a sorrowful threnody, almost choral-like as they echo across the elegiac melody that takes over the last half of the song. And then when they slip from that into the shorter instrumental closer "The Moment", it's like a clearing of thunderheads, black clouds breaking apart as shafts of weak sunlight manage to finally penetrate the gloom, the delicate, almost folksy bass melody drifting languidly over the ruined and blasted terrain that is left in their wake.

     Issued in a limited run of six hundred copies.