Rating: 9.0

Country: Hungary

Release Date: 2008

Record Label: Subterra Records

Track list:
1. One Pill, One Kiss (6:13)
2. A Forma Lehulló Cseppjei (6:10)
3. 3 (instrumental) (6:02)
4. Ma Dél Felol Kelt A Nap (6:07) [mp3]

Band Website: Leiru

Leiru - 3 (Demo)

Members - [Note: the band neglected to send appropriate info with CD citing lack of info as a boon to unbiased journalists, and I can't find it anywhere on the net, so... ¯\(º_o)/¯.)

With its vivid glaze of an album cover and casually messy handwritten scrawl of a band logo, it's immediately obvious that this cryptic Hungarian black metal band is not aiming for the whole superion war command goatblood kvlt angle. Considering this intentionally clandestine surface appeal, it's only appropriate that I get right into the music: Leiru dabble in the noise spectrum of the genre, using careful layering and overwhelming distortion to twist their black metal into a caliginous, lo-fi ether of static skree.

When Leiru call themselves "eclectic" on their site, they're not fucking around. Merzbowian haze cocoons operatic babble, jazzy noodling and melodious synthesizers, which in turn sinks into yet more scrambling guitar noise, all swirling around in a delirious blur of unlikely stylistic juxtapositions and blaring, croaking white noise froth that answers for vocals. It's all a bit of a mess; the head's connected to the knee and the knee's connected to the spleen and it all probably shouldn't logically work, but by means of some clandestine balance between violence and elegance, it does. Not entirely unstructured, it'll occasionally settle into a modest groove or gauntlet of frosty tremolo linearity, but no matter what the compositional spine is doing, it's all mostly just blissfully noisy.

Somewhat bittersweet music due to the conflict between its clever structure and shrieking delivery, Leiru is sort of like those infamously sour jawbreakers that may or may not have been popular when you were in middle school. The dense layering of buzzing high-end guitars will doubtlessly scrape your nerves, but anyone without shit for brains could appreciate the harmonic coherence and elaborate texture of the final product. More than an acidic wash of strangulated strings and e-bow fuckery, this is a profoundly personal (if messy and scatterbrained) work of grief and creativity in a genre that has long been in the middle of the classic artistic crabwalk from individualist idealism to dogmatic zeal. Seriously, if you're looking for some fascinating music, do yourself a favor.

July 30th, 2008