Artist: Rôtn
Country: Sweden
Label: Altare Records
Formats: CDr
Year: 2025
Although I do like some of Magnus “Wagner Ödegård” Eriksson’s work, I always approach his work with a fair amount of scepticism and general caution. You really never know what you’re in for every time he’s bringing some new music to the table. Most of the Wulkanaz’ material is decent, but I can certainly do without those dreadful Dark Ambient/Dungeon Synth releases he sometime comes up with. For me, however, he wrote his most interesting piece of music with Rôtn, one of his newer projects.
The label describes it as having a “strong Beherit vibe”. That is certainly true, with a rather gnarly and grainy production this has nothing to do with the more slick sounding kind of Black Metal, yet, I wouldn’t exactly think of Beherit as the best comparison. As a matter of fact, Rôtn mostly sounds like a Punk band with blaring vocals and an occasional pitch shifted growl. It is not only the basic drum rhythms and the open-chord guitars that remind of Hardcore/Punk, also the short tracks, all clocking roughly between 40 second and well below two minutes.
This compilation CDr presents the project’s first demo, originally released on cassette tape in 2023 by Brugmanziah, as well as a new demo of about the same 10 minutes in length. The first demo has a bit more of that wild caveman-like Black/Death Metal sound and attitude that typified such bands as Beherit, Blasphemy, Von and old Demoncy, yet it is especially the second, and possibly newer, demo that has that strong Hardcore/Punk connotation. Not necessarily bad, but it lacks some of the persuasiveness of the bands that served as musical examples. It all feels a bit too contrived, and it seems as though Eriksson is operating just a bit too far outside his comfort zone here.
