"Surtalogi" is Morton's second demo and they have ideas to work on, though they are a bit slack on their overall development as it sounds like a side-project. Their topics apparenly vary as the first demo was about werewolves, now this is about ancient germanic wisdom and sagas. I liked this kind of variance of topics with bands like Iron Maiden. In black metal it tends to degenerate into a disgusting open-mindedness, which makes you want to split open their minds with an axe.

This demo here is not bad, but I am disappointed they did not develop the mixture of droning, feedbacked, quite evil industrial black metal and ambient noise further from their earlier demo I heard. "Surtalogi" lasts for 50 minutes, most of it being simple ear-shattering, yet meditative metal a bit in the vein of Burzum's "Filosofem" also soundwise. The tracks are bridged together with short interludes that are purposefully similar - but a bit disappointing because the first demo showed us that they could really go somewhere with the ambient stuff.

© 2001 black hate