Album Review: Feral Forms - Through Demonic Spell
Reviewed by Sam Jones
I’d heard much about Feral Forms without a single second of music coming to me; the band have been gravitating a lot of excitement across various social media platforms that I felt I need to check them out to see whether it was truly warranted. Feral Forms, hailing from Trieste, Italy, style themselves as a black/death metal outfit, having only formed in 2022. Their first release, their Premalignant EP, dropped just a year later and in the course of releasing Singles leading up to this record, the band were picked up by Everlasting Spew Records and set Through Demonic Spell for a November 29th release date. I was certainly curious given the traffic these guys were attaining online, and thus I thought I’d dive in to their first full length release to see whether the band live up to the hype we’ve seen germinating lately.
With a band logo that Feral Forms use, and knowing what style of metal they play, it doesn’t take much to put two and two together in order to understand these guys aren’t here to pull punches. With less than half an hour to work with, Feral Forms throw your back to the wall and impale and pierce and slice and cut every inch of your flesh to the most heinous degree possible. There’s no apology for the style and aesthetic they ooze with; their soundscape is seething and furious, and their riffs, immense yet compactly tucked away within the mix, ensure the audience is glued to the record with each prevailing track. It did interest me that Feral Forms, though styled as a black/death metal band, do not employ techniques or aesthetics familiar to Grindcore acts, which is what I thought they’d be doing. Instead, the band keep their feet firmly to the ground and whilst their performance is high with intensity and a rabid hatred pervading the album’s runtime, it still manages to be conveyed with structure and order. It’s a portrait of a band that’s right on the cusp of letting all sanity loose, knowing they full well could utilise more Grindcore elements and choose not to.
As far as the mix is concerned I believe Through Demonic Spell has been handled extremely well. It doesn’t take long for you to realise the band aren’t messing around, they don’t have that much time to work with and thus they needed to convey their strength and fury as soon as they could. But whilst their performance is evidently relentless it never tries swelling to such monstrous scale that the audience wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend what they’re doing. Though the band assail us with meaty, outlined riffs and other vocal and instrumentation that’s far from muddied, their overall soundscape manages to retain this minute, exclusive space. Instead of pushing their sound out as far as it could ever possibly go, it’s as if the band reduced the scale of the record to maybe a third of the size of more cavernous albums, and instead filled that space with as much as can possibly be fit within. As a result, though the band are clearly throwing a lot at you, it never challenges your capacity to digest and enjoy what is being played in the moment. It’s why their more thunderous displays of playing are still recognised for what they are, without them hindering the audience’s ability to make coherent sense of what’s happening. Feral Forms wanted to destroy their audience but in at the expense of lowering the quality of the listening experience.
The unrestrained animalism these vocals elicit is striking. We’ve naturally heard many a vocal delivery adopt a more beastial style of performance however these performances are often paired with Grindcore and more maniacal forms of riff playing. It’s arguably because the band’s mode of attack is sadistic yet tempered that the vocals feel so much prominent herein; had the band’s riffs and songwriting on the whole been more gnashing, more inhuman, then the vocals, though recognisably feral, wouldn’t have assumed the prominence and virile animalism they possess. It’s worth mentioning that while the vocals’ tempo doesn’t change too much, they manage to work regardless what tempo the songwriting’s flow is working with. Whether the band are at breakneck pace or they bring things right down, the vocals are able to interplay with either decision, likely because of the snarling, canine-styled fervour that’s going into their projection.
I think the most underrated element to this record are the drums. You’d think, a record like this, the drums would just be rolled out to deliver an uncompromising number of blast beats but here we would be mistaken. Like the riffs, and the direction the songwriting takes us down, the band know when to unfurl their attack but also when to hold back, and the same applies to the drums, for as the songwriting shifts and the mood evolves across their varying tracks then so does the tempo and the vibe their drums bring to their soundscape. You might have one instance of unrelenting blast beats come forth but then they’ll quickly die down to deliver us something much more methodical and thought out. This is not a caveman beating away at the drum kit but a clearly planned out assault that ebbs and flows depending on what the track in question requires. The cymbal crashing and the Tom-toms and the bass drums all resounding against one another aid in crafting the piercing soundscape this record permeates so successfully with.
In conclusion, Through Demonic Spell is an album that never holds your hand nor does it apologise for what it is, yet at the same time it doesn’t rip your head so clean off that you can’t digest it thoroughly, or feel like you haven’t fundamentally understood what it’s all about by its runtime’s end. This record is akin to a wild, starved beast that’s roaring and red in the face except it’s still held to its place by just one but hardened chain. You always feel like the band could go that half a step further and truly let themselves loose but Feral Forms opt not to do so, delivering us an opus that straddles that line between animality and control extremely finely. There’s been a lot of social media traffic regarding Feral Forms and I now understand why for they’ve got this mixture of contempt and structure and mixing that gives their sound a uniquely organised severity. I would definitely be interested to see what they do in a future EP or album.
