MISERY: On Demon Wings

Produced by Misery

Released: 2007

Few bands were as consistent as Brisbane veterans Misery. They never really changed much from album to album. While for some bands that meant becoming really repetitive by their third or fourth album, it was always Misery’s style and approach that remained the same, not their material. For them, each release was wall to wall with dark, cataclysmic death metal, but mixed up with a bit of doom and tempered ever so slightly by melody. Really, Misery was the closest any Australian band got to perfecting the ultimate death metal template cut by Morbid Angel, and only isolation and constant record label problems stopped the rest of the world from appreciating them.

So we come to their fourth and, sadly, final album, On Demon Wings. Recorded in 2005 but unreleased until 2007 by emerging Brisbane extreme label Obsidian, On Demon Wings shows that the transition from four-piece to trio with the departure of guitarist Laz Khananghinis had no adverse effect on Misery’s music. This has all the hallmarks of the band’s distinctive brand of metal: the dark guitar sound, the grinding riffs, Damon Robinson’s tomb-throated vocals, slower, doom-ridden passages and occasional bursts of melody and groove.

The title track is built on a monolithic descending riff as slow as it is monstrous; “Butchered” is even slower, almost pure doom-death with Robinson sounding like the door to a crypt creaking slowly open. Elsewhere of course, Misery play pretty fast, sometimes coming close to grind. Again, this is exactly the type of trick this band became known for, but most importantly of all, On Demon Wings is just as good as anything they’ve done before. Pick any track on here, from “Priest” to “Burning Hatred” and what you get is nothing less than crushingly heavy, demonic death metal of the highest quality.

Misery was one of the country’s best metal bands and On Demon Wings shows how much they will be missed.

1. Priest
2. On Demon Wings
3. Twisting the Knife
4. Blood of Ancients
5. Butchered
6. Ill of the Dead
7. Disciples of War
8. The Black Arts
9. And They They Die
10. In Tongues
11. Burning Hatred

Rating: 85%