Mercaator - Sacrifice [DEMO] (2010)

Sacrifice is a bit of a teaser demo from a Russian grind/death act known as Mercaator, with some connections to the black/death band Messiya I recently reviewed. There is not much meat on the bones here, the entire playtime coming in at under 4 minutes, but for what it's worth, the band are able to pull off some half-decent licks in the 30-40 seconds allotted to each. There are six of them here, with programmed drums, thick distorted bass lines, and blunt vocals. But the best aspect of the band are the guitars ,which alternate between meatier chords and then old school death melodies, most of which stand out in the memory, but simply exist for too short a period of time to really ingest.

For my ears, the best songs were "Sacrifice" with its great, streaming pattern of brutality and the thick plunk of its bass; and "General Genital" which has a rough, tough punk aesthetic that it beats you over the head with like a brick. The vocal patterns are pretty simple, and don't add much aside from their own percussive nonchalance, but these two songs were good enough that I wanted them to be longer, like full death metal songs, or at least give me the 1-2 minutes of a Nasum or Rotten Sound cut. "Blind Faith" is sort of a half-way space between these two tracks, and then "Copro" is a spatter of quick hardcore/grind. I liked the opener "Piercing" somewhat less, and "Misanthropy" has a bizarre, elevating playfulness about it which, while amusing, was not as effective as the better cuts here.

As usual, you get out of something what effort you put in, and this likely did not take the Russians very long to compose. Thus, it doesn't have a lot of lasting value. But for all its relative cheapness, there is a spark of promise in the riff writing that might pay off if the band let the tracks get a little more breathing space (whether they are serious or not doesn't matter, the songs will benefit). Something like Mercaator seems like it would be fun to put together with friends, and if anything, you could listen to this entire demo in the same space as you could listen to a shitty Lady Gaga song, so why the hell not?

Verdict: Indifference [5.25/10]

http://www.myspace.com/mercaator