DARK DEVOTION, Rehearsal 2009 (2009, demo)

The skull:
Wary be, ye hirsute skulls whose mangy locks dangle from thy rotting domes, lest thy foetid tresses become entangled admidst the stalagmites upthrust from the deep recesses in which ye dwell, and ye be pulled down and indeed impaled thereon. Thy graven stars, powerful though they ordinarily be, shall afford thee no protection from such odious entrapment, and long may ye tarry against thy wills in these lowly places. Thy dark devotion in such times shall verily be tested sore.

The music:
Only ten copies of this rehearsal demo were released, and naturally, I am one of the damned souls who owns one. After hearing the merest rumors of their 2008 opus #08, I decamped to Ciudad Victoria in Mexico, where I made nightly rounds of the town’s cemetaries. One fateful evening, I caught a glimpse of a ghoulishly painted man making blasphemous entreaties among the fog-wreathed sepulchers, and I followed him thereafter to discover his lair. I patiently surveilled the location until such a time as he welcomed several other corpselike persons into his company, and then from the bowels of that foreboding place, I heard the sinister strains of the most unholy black metal. I laid a freshly severed goat head before their threshold and hid myself, knowing they would find my offering. This ritual I repeated for 13 nights, and on the following evening, which was indeed marked by a full moon, the band did not gather at their black conventicle (having no doubt more sinister affairs to attend to elsewhere), but on the spot where nightly I left my grim sacrifice, a starkly illustrated CDR was left. I ran with this gift back to my meager lodgings and immediately inserted it into the player, whereby I was assaulted by the shittiest, most cliche black metal imaginable, and I realized how truly I had wasted my time for the better part of two months.
— Friar Johnsen