Bandcamp Six years passed between this band’s self titled record and Volcano, and according to Simeon the first one was made by four people recording in four separate flats. The second was made in April 2023 at Goblin Sound in Cologne, with Andy Rosczyk of Ultha recording, mixing and mastering it. That is the whole story of the EP, and it is audible from the first minute.
What the studio bought them is a low end that keeps its shape under load. The guitars are stacked but the bass is still a separate thing underneath them, the drums sound like drums in a room rather than samples pretending to be, and the vocals sit far enough forward that the words survive the weight. For a four piece from Bad Münstereifel working in a register where mud is the default outcome, that is not a small achievement, and it is the reason to spend twenty six minutes here.
The intro is the only thing that moves
“Hauyn” opens with clean guitar, lets the full band in before the ten second mark, and runs under two minutes. It is also the only track on the EP with any meaningful distance between its quiet and its loud passages. The four songs that follow hold one level from start to finish, and they hold the same one as each other.
This is a genre where that is a legitimate choice rather than a fault, and nothing here is crushed flat in the mastering. But the EP opens by showing you it can do contrast and then does not use it again, and across four songs of roughly six minutes each the ear starts filing them together. The tonal centre barely shifts between them either, so there is not much colour to tell them apart by.
The exception is the middle of “Demon”, where a German spoken passage drops into the middle of the track and the arrangement gets out of its way. It is the one moment where the record changes what it is doing rather than how hard it is doing it, and it lands harder than any of the riffs around it because of that.
So
Worth hearing, and the three out of five is a mark for what it is rather than against it. A band that went from four flats to a proper studio and came back with something this solid has done the hard part. What holds it here is that the songs do not yet make use of the room they paid for: the intro proves the band can open up, “Demon” proves they can change direction, and the other three tracks do neither. If the next record treats those two moments as the plan rather than the garnish, it will be a different conversation. Start at “Demon” and go back to the intro afterwards.
The intro carries the record’s entire dynamic range. “Hauyn (Intro)” measures 12.1 decibels between its quiet and loud passages; the four songs that follow run 4.8, 4.6, 3.3 and 3.4, which puts the EP’s median at 4.6 and places it 46th of the 48 albums in our measurement set. That narrowness is not mastering damage: crest values sit between 10.8 and 12.1 decibels above average and average levels between minus 11.0 and minus 12.5, so there is headroom left and nothing is limited into a block. The rest of the measurements are unusually stable. Tonal centres run 1998 to 2213 hertz across all five tracks, the band under two hundred and fifty hertz holds 23.9 to 26.7 percent, the midrange 42.4 to 44.9 and treble 12.7 to 16.2. The intro is the only track that sits apart from the rest on more than one measure, with the least weight at the bottom and the most in the band above it.
Standout tracks: Demon, Hauyn (Intro), Reflection zero
