Demon Project – Kara Ora

• 24th Nov 2009

Demon project-Kara ora.
It’s wide open with Demon project’s ‘Kara ora’ intro. It can be all too familiar to use radio incidentals and chatter, but there’s something about how Demon project taint it with unsettling effects, tribal chanting and military communications white noise; then as a dance line is etched out your just about to cry ‘What the fuck is going on?’ when they punch you square in the back of the head with ‘Fear-is my rage’.
This is one future of industrial metal, originally mixing pop elements, dark wave, metal and a host of influences far to varied to be mentioned in one sitting, Demon project destroy the box you may have put extreme industrial metal into.
It’s all done through sheer bravery, when faced with giving something new to a genre you have to push at the edges of what has gone before-otherwise what’s the point?, trapped in the comfort zone of a style can often be the final resting place of bands.
Sample ‘Loosing the fate’ with just a beautifully arranged opening, shades of Depeche mode, dance with Fear factory and rise into something genuinely intriguing-it’s heavy, dark metal-but with different note choices, stepping out of the norm just to colour the melody and resuming rank before it goes too far.
There’s the beat of Prodigy being beaten by Sepultura, frantically being remixed by Devin Townsend. Demon project are very aware they are trying to carve their own scar, and avoid all the pitfalls of over indulgence, samples for samples sake and unnecessary flippancy.
One of the linchpins in ‘Kara ora’ is ‘Endless circles’, just movement after movement of well crafted riffs funnelling along a less than quiet aggression, that Paradise lost style solemn suffering. On the several occasions when Dmitry sings it’s another colour well received, but it also represents the area where Demon project can grow; more chances taken with the vocals could deliver some extremely potent results, not that there isn’t exceptional vocal performances on offer here-the female vocals on ‘Kara Ora’are sublime.
If ‘Endless circles’ and ‘Prison of me’ represent the linchpins of the album then surely ‘No hate’ is the epoch-at the point of almost collapsing in on itself it twists into something darkly pointed an effective, searing through the mix.
With the rule book thoroughly researched, then destroyed ‘Run’ dodges bullets of predictability- the hardest track to define- forms a picture in to what may come from this Russian industrial metal band. Ending on ‘Reach the sky’ there is no quiet lament fading away, it sounds like Demon project are just getting started.
In an absolute masterstroke Demon project have slipped industrial metal through the back door of accessibility and produced an album to be savoured, perfectly capable of standing within its own genre, whilst also being distinctive.

Mark Cooper.