Lykoszine

These Portuguese metallers have been around a long time (since ’93) but have only produced self-released demos so far. This is a five track demo with a nicely put together booklet and the whole package is available for download from their official site. Four of the tracks are fast-paced, guitar-driven black metal although with more deathish vocals interspersed with occasional spoken sound clips (Stephen Hawking at one point) covering standard black metal topics of war, dark enchantresses etc. There are subtle keyboard layers on most parts. The other track is old-school death metal with lots of blast beats. Its all competently played and the production mix is pretty good but it doesn’t really stand out from the crowd and could do with more tempo variation.