Being a deeply interesting and charismatic person, I keep a spreadsheet with everything I listen to on it. One of the things I keep track of is my initial score after listening to an album and how I feel about it later. Usually it’s a nice way to track how things grow on me. When it came to death metal band Shrieking Demons‘ debut, The Festering Dwellers, the opposite happened. I gave it a good score after the first listen, and then could never regain that sense of enjoyment, to the point that if I didn’t have that initial score in the sheet I wouldn’t believe it had happened.
Shrieking Demons namecheck Death and Autopsy as their comparables. In terms of style, that’s pretty accurate as long as we’re talking about those bands in their earlier, rawer eras. The Festering Dwellers is all malevolently melodic riffs and pounding rhythms. Sometimes they get some of the captivating feral weirdness of those bands, as on “Sorrowful Dismal Bliss” and the galloping “Apostasy, Sodomy and Sacrilege”. The interlude “Garden of the Headless Dead” in particular catches me as an example of that spirit. Yet most of The Festering Dwellers just slides off of me. Every now and again something sparks my interest and gets my head nodding but it’s never the same moment on repeated listens. There is no particular flaw I can speak of here. There’s nothing glaringly wrong that Shrieking Demons are doing. It’s just that very little here truly commands my attention.
Maybe that’s a mood thing. Maybe I was in the right mood for The Festering Dwellers the first time I listened to it and haven’t been since, and some day I’ll come back to it and it’ll hit again. All I can do though is speak the truth I have today. There’s not a shortage of bands reviving that 90s death metal sound and there are others that entertain me far more consistently than Shrieking Demons. It’s certainly worth a listen for anyone into that sound — just don’t expect it to stay in your rotation.
