Artist: Grieving Mirror
Country: USA
Label: Neuro Plastic
Formats: Demo Tape
Year: 2025
Either scavenging around on Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, digging around through distro lists and webshops or following the much appreciated tips and hints from people whose nose for quality underground music I blindly trust… With quite a few miles on the clock, I still love to indulge myself in new music, discovering new bands and being amazed by the greatness of good music. I often hear people say that they can’t feel the same type or level of enthusiasm for new music like they had some decades ago. Of course everything has a different impact if you “have heard it all before”, but I honestly I am still a happy camper when I run into something good. Like this first demo tape by Grieving Mirror, a one-man Black Metal band from the US. This 22-minute demo tape, released by Neuro Plastic, might not offer you a life-changing piece of music, but it really shows why I am still roaming around, looking for my daily fix.
With a somewhat mournful and haunting guitar piece at the beginning, ‘Opulence And Grandeur’ unfolds as some interestingly raw yet atmospheric Black Metal. This demo’s title seems to be referring more to the atmospheric side of the music, but there’s definitely more to sink your teeth in.
While the eerie melodies are caught in a balancing act between Raw Black Metal’s aesthetics and Atmospheric Black Metal’s grandeur, the guitars and especially overall production is kind of raw, almost bordering Lo-Fi territories. That leaves the music with a slightly schizophrenic character, something that is certainly not unfamiliar within the confines of the Black Metal genre, but seems much more the case here and most likely deliberately so. A grainy guitar tone, with the occasional sinister distorted strumming and picking, and a icy and screechy vocal delivery firmly anchors ‘Opulence And Grandeur’ to the reigning laws Black Metal. Yet it is the repetitiveness of the riffs and the melodies, that seem to come in an ever-flowing stream, give the music its very profound gloomy atmosphere. If you’d take a listen to ‘Hex Of Ancestral Heirloom’ for instance, you’ll hear a repeating main riff that harkens back to Shining’s ‘IV: The Eerie Cold’-album or even Urgehal’s ‘Goatcraft Torment’, the melodies that wouldn’t feel out of place on a random contemporary Black/Doom Metal record and a production that has the toughness and crudity of many of today’s Raw Black Metal elite.
‘Opulence And Grandeur’ is both ugly and beautiful, strangely compelling and, above all, a very interesting listen. Keeping in consideration that this is only this project’s first offering, I am very curious what is yet to come when everything is further balanced and all creative notions are further refined.
