Artist: Cadaverno
Country: Chile
Label: Cadaverismo
Formats: Cassette EP
Year: 2025
It’s probably not quite a good sign when you’re starting to have conversations about how good the times were when you were young. Most likely it means that you’re getting old and fat. Which is, in fact, quite hard to deny. But I think it is inevitable that, at some point in time, you’re starting to long back to the time when you were a teenager or in your early twenties. I often find myself reminiscing about those days when every musical discovery still set my heart racing, when everything was still new and I threw myself headfirst into whatever I could find. I was born just a little too late to experience the full extent of the tape trading scene, but I did catch the tail end of it. Those days when you had to go to great lengths to get hold of and listen to new demos. I miss them a lot.
Although, sadly, it’s really only very rarely that I get to experience those same feelings again, I still really enjoy listening to new music. But it’s demos like this one, ‘Eterno En Caos’ by the Chilean Death Metal band Cadaverno, that do manage to rekindle a touch of those old sentiments. The funny thing is that it’s often not the very best demos or records that bring back some of that old feeling for me. It’s often the recordings that are a bit rough around the edges and have a sense of purity and youthful passion.
I say ‘youthful passion’, but these lads are already in their thirties, so in a literal sense there isn’t much youth left. But on a musical side, this fits perfectly in how I lived the mid-to-late 90s and the early 00s. Take a look at the cover art alone, if that doesn’t give you a little itch, then you’re probably too young. The music fits perfectly with the cover art. Cadaverno’s music is entirely and solely built on what those early adopters of Death Metal brought into this world. It still has a clear touch of Thrash Metal, but it is definitely more heavy than what the waning Thrash Metal scene of the late 80s was able to bring.
It would’ve been easy to believe if someone claimed this was a demo tape from 1990. There’s a fair bit of old Deceased, Master, Revenant and Possessed in ‘Eterno En Caos’, but the band’s backbone in particular consists of that wild and pure aesthetics of South American brutality. Musicians from the late 1980s in countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Chile have built a culture of their own based on those American and European examples of Extreme Metal. I can’t remember hearing something so authentically accurate to those days as with this demo (or EP, if you prefer) by this Chilean trio – currently a quartet.
This is a textbook example of “feeling over capacities”, this ticks all the right boxes and it accumulates into underground perfection. Which isn’t to say that these guys don’t know how to play their instruments, but the thing is that, at least for me, the emphasis is mainly on the emotional aspect and less on the musical flourishes. That perfect imperfection of a live or rehearsal sound is simply irresistible to me.
