Bandcamp According to the credits, this was recorded live, mixed and mastered at Kerwax by Christophe Chavanon, entirely on analog tape and analog gear. Claims like that usually survive contact with a meter about as well as a press release survives contact with a lawyer. This one does not just survive it. It explains the whole measurement.
What tape does to a record
Demons Left to Roam has the lowest average level of anything we have measured, by a clear margin over the previous quietest. That is not a complaint, it is the opposite: it means nobody went back afterwards and pushed the thing up. The peaks sit a comfortable distance above the average on every track, so the loud parts are actually loud instead of merely continuous, and a record that is already dense gets to breathe in a way that most fuzz albums never do.
The second surprise is where the weight is not. For a doom band from Toulouse on Heavy Psych Sounds, you would expect the energy to pile up underneath. It does not. The bottom band is thin by our standards, among the lightest third of everything we have on file, and more than half of the record’s energy sits in the midrange instead. That is what four people playing at once in a room sounds like when nobody has layered a sub underneath afterwards. The guitars are the record. The bass is in there holding the floor, but it is not pretending to be a separate instrument the size of a building.
Whether you like that depends entirely on what you want doom to feel like. If you want it to press on your chest, this will feel polite. If you want to hear a band rather than a production, this is the better version.
The two that break out
“Cursed Night Circle” opens the record and opens it wide, with far more distance between its quietest and loudest moment than anything else here, roughly four times what any of the next three manages. It is also where the singing is most theatrical, a clean voice sat well forward with a lot of room around it. Starting with your most dynamic song is a risk, because everything after it is working against a memory.
The other one is the closer, and it is a cover. “The Zany Magician” is an Eloy song from 1975, which tells you the band know exactly which lineage they are claiming, and it is the second widest thing here. Covering a fifty year old German prog track at the end of a record about horror films and satanic litanies should be a novelty. It is instead the most convincing argument on the album that these four can play.
In between, “The Blinded Magpie” is the one to watch. It carries a guest vocal from Marion Leclercq, credited rather than buried, and the voice sits above the riff rather than inside it. Guests on heavy records usually get swallowed. This one changes the song.
Verdict
Recommended, and more warmly than the rating alone suggests, because what this record does well is the thing that is hardest to fake. It sounds like a performance. The caveat is real too and it sits in the middle of the album: tracks two through four run close together in range, level and colour, and after an opener that wide, the record spends a stretch sounding like it is waiting. If you are new to the band, start at “The Zany Magician”, which is the least representative song here and the most persuasive.
The master is the unusual part. Average levels run between minus 18.8 and minus 20.0 decibels, which is the quietest album in our thirty eight record measurement set, and crest values hold between 11.9 and 13.2 decibels above average, so there is real headroom throughout and nothing has been pushed. The frequency balance is midrange-led: the band between eight hundred hertz and five kilohertz carries 51.6 to 54.3 percent of the energy, fifth highest on file, while the low band under two hundred and fifty hertz holds only 16.2 to 19.0 percent, which places it in the lightest third we have measured. Treble runs 10.2 to 12.7 percent and tonal centres are unusually tight at 2058 to 2204 hertz. Dynamic range is where the album splits: a median of 7.2 decibels, but “Cursed Night Circle” opens 21.7 and the Eloy cover 15.5, against 4.5 on “Doctor Terror” and 5.5 on “Lost Dimension”.
Standout tracks: The Zany Magician, Cursed Night Circle, The Blinded Magpie
