Artist: Wisteria
Country: USA
Label: Lampshade Tapes
Formats: Digital Demo
Year: 2025
Wisteria, a one-man Black Metal band from Cleveland, Ohio, came to life early 2024 with a debut full-length called ‘Nightfall’. With its serene cover art and expressive title, it wasn’t much of a surprise that Wisteria ventured into the dark and depressive regions of the Black Metal genre. With its atmospheric approach, the album was undoubtedly convincing, so this follow-up demo has certainly been welcomed with open arms.
Albeit in a slightly more balanced way, ‘Haunted By Memories’ falls straight in line with its predecessor. It beautifully blends fast and mournful Depressive Black Metal with the more colourful palette of Atmospheric Black Metal, a sonic melange that has been tried and tested a million times before, but doesn’t always work as well as in this particular case. Because of the overall brisk pace, the haunted and tortured vocals the music retains a good beefy texture that prevents the music to sound overly dramatic or mellow. In addition there’s a surprisingly important role for the bass guitar that occasionally pierces through in an almost ingenious way, showing off the talent of the anonymous musician.
While the music is far from standard “depressive”, at the same time it really fits painstakingly and painfully with the cover that comes with ‘Haunted By Memories’. Digging deep into the mind, unearthing feelings best kept hidden from daylight. Feelings of painful nostalgia, longing for days gone by, heart breaking memories… ‘Haunted By Memories’ is definitely a soundtrack for those weaker mental moments, or maybe just the opposite.
Although this band is operated by the same person who is also behind the Lampshade Tapes label, it seems that no cassette tape version of ‘Haunted By Memories’ is in sight. Instead it will be presented on a “pro”-CDr, something that for sure compromises the quality of the musical content of this excellent demo.
