Artist: Kommodus
Album: An Imperial Sun Rises (demo)
Genre: Black Metal
Country: Australia
Label: Unsigned
Preview Track:
At the end of the day, I think I just like Kommodus because they're weird. I mean, they're not necessarily the weirdest band I've come across and all four of main-man Lepidus Plague's demos under the Kommodus name have amounted to similarly raw and inscrutable black metal. There's definitely kookier musicians in extreme metal today, but Kommodus have my kind of kooky in them, the kind of kooky that amounts to an Aussie black metaller that normally writes about ancient Rome due to his Italian ancestry suddenly dropping a demo centered around Japanese author Yukio Mishima. I'm going to ignore for now that Mishima was an outspoken anti-Marxist activist in a nation that is to this day extremely nationalistic and racist (frankly there's a couple of lines in the Bandcamp description for this album that imply a bit about Lepidus Plague's politics) since it's all very vague and ambiguous. While I'm not a fan of all that, I am a fan of the visceral, vicious black metal on An Imperial Sun Rises. The difficulty is that it really is a very inscrutable style that makes it difficult to talk about. It's cavernous, warm yet with a bit of harsh treble in the mix to keep it old school, and the riffs trend a bit towards first wave classics more so than the second wave. There's a fair helping of melody in there too so it's not all angry blasting. That's about it. Part of what draws me to this demo and its predecessors is that vagueness you can't quite grasp, that quality that pushes you away as much as it draws you in. Maybe Kommodus aren't really the weird ones. Maybe it's just me.
At the end of the day, I think I just like Kommodus because they're weird. I mean, they're not necessarily the weirdest band I've come across and all four of main-man Lepidus Plague's demos under the Kommodus name have amounted to similarly raw and inscrutable black metal. There's definitely kookier musicians in extreme metal today, but Kommodus have my kind of kooky in them, the kind of kooky that amounts to an Aussie black metaller that normally writes about ancient Rome due to his Italian ancestry suddenly dropping a demo centered around Japanese author Yukio Mishima. I'm going to ignore for now that Mishima was an outspoken anti-Marxist activist in a nation that is to this day extremely nationalistic and racist (frankly there's a couple of lines in the Bandcamp description for this album that imply a bit about Lepidus Plague's politics) since it's all very vague and ambiguous. While I'm not a fan of all that, I am a fan of the visceral, vicious black metal on An Imperial Sun Rises. The difficulty is that it really is a very inscrutable style that makes it difficult to talk about. It's cavernous, warm yet with a bit of harsh treble in the mix to keep it old school, and the riffs trend a bit towards first wave classics more so than the second wave. There's a fair helping of melody in there too so it's not all angry blasting. That's about it. Part of what draws me to this demo and its predecessors is that vagueness you can't quite grasp, that quality that pushes you away as much as it draws you in. Maybe Kommodus aren't really the weird ones. Maybe it's just me.
