Finally released on CD, this definitive reissue of Supurations Promo '91 demo cassette takes the material from the original 1991 cassette self-released by this cult French death metal outfit and fleshes it out with their three songs from the 1992 Obscurum Per Obscurius compilation released on Reincarnate Records. So this is ground-zero for one of the most experimental derath mertal bands to come out of Europe in the early 1990s, and honestly, it still blows my mind with the sheer crazed ingenuity that these kids put on display. Like most Dark Symphonies reissues, this is a beautiful edition of these recordings, and includes a twelve-page booklet with liner notes, lyrics, art and ephemera from this period in the band's existence, and really goes the extra mile to provide a comprehensive listening experience.

That craft and care is slightly humorous considering how fucking putrid and gross this music is. Later on, Supuration (and their prog alter-ego SUP) took death metal into ever freaked-out and bizarro regions, but even this early in their career Supuration were doing some radical things with the death metal form. The main demo is made up of eight tracks of convoluted filth, with somewhat standard issue DM song titles masking the weirdness. As the first few tracks start smacking you around, "The Creeping Unknown", "In Remembrance Of A Coma", and "Sultry Obsession" jam solid then-contempo deathcrush down your gullet, with the expected guttural, inhuman grunts, chromatic chord progressions and violent tempo shifts, nutso bursts of shredding solos, blasts and double bass grinding you beneath their treads. Definitely feels like they had been jamming the Autopsy and Carcass albums in their downtime. There is a doom-laden downtuned heaviness crawling through all of it. But the music also promptly goes unconventional: just on opener "Creeping", you get these dramatic sung vocals, piano pieces, clean chorus-rich guitar sections that could have been peeled off a Killing Joke tune, and an increasingly eccentric approach to the songwriting itself. Abd the demo just builds on that off-kilter approach with every new song: "Coma" kicks out left-field stop-start rythms, layered vocals that get more rabid by the minute, and an increasingly dissonant approach to the guitar riffs and the weird chords that both keep that weirdly post-punk element and a unique combination of scales and oddball discordance that back in the day had these guys getting some passing comparisons to Voivod. But to me, it sounds more like Supuration were absorbing some of the same influences and music that Voivod were into (prog rock, Killing Joke, etc.), and just doing their own gene-manipulation to create what tuens into a pretty unique strain of gonzo prog-death.

The clean vocals, sometimes sung, sometimes spoken, are one of the main aspects of the demo that give it that weird vibe. Often delivered with this robotic effect on the voice, those contrast with the puke-a-thon growls in interesting ways. That, and those shimmery guitar arpeggios that bring that vaguely aforementioned post-punk melody, are what really set this apart from anything else in the death metal scene, French or otherwise, at that point in time. The musicianship is sharp, these guys definitely knew what they were doing, and even the strangest elements feel very deliberate and conscious. And the brutality keeps getting odder, like the slick synthesizers on "Sultry Obsession", the droning dissonance and quasi-industrial percussion of "1308.JP.S", "Sojourns In The Absurd"'s peculiar quasi-progginess, the violins in "Sojourns In The Absurd", almost 70s-era hard rock soloing sprouting out of "Ephemeral Paradise". Weird, but catchy. Weird, but fuckin' groovy (with that riff on "Paradise", oh man, and the thrash breakdowns on "Reverie Of A Bloated Cadaver"...goddfamnit these dudes could groove). Weird, but stompingly and unrepentantly heavy as hell. The remaster for this disc release makes the Promo 91 sound like an album proper to me, and the additional heft and definitetion goesa long way to illuminate how terminally mutant this band was. And how imaginative this band was.

The three compm songs included are alternate recordings of "In Remenberance Of A Coma" and "1308.JP.08", which differ slightly with a heavier production, heavier guitar presence, some added oddball interludes and breaks, and more layering of the vocal tracks, where the droning clear chant-sing is a little less monotone; especially on "1308.JP.08" where it sounds like singer Ludovic Loez might have been more fully embracing the "Voivodian" comparisons that the band was receiving . But there's also a song called "Half Dead " from this session that I guess is exclsuive to that Obscurum Per Obscurius compilation, and it's pretty twisted. Still rooted in that gnarly doom-death crush, but the song structure is pretty idiosyncratic, pointing toward the more complex and confusional songcraft of subsequent releases. Oh, and it's got some wicked sweeps and solos from the Loez brothers that add a new layer to their music.