NARROW MIND, Lady Moonlight (2011, demo)

The skull:
The complete and total ugliness of this cover is impossible to deny. The skull (goofy eyes and all) appears to have been drawn in MS-Paint, and the title appears to be set in Comic Sans! The logo, meanwhile, is the sort of shiny 3D junk that was very common in the early/mid 90s when consumer-level modelling software started to become available. The whole affair seems to have been calculatedly crafted to cultivate the appearance of amateurishness, perhaps in some grand ironic display. And while I’m generally of a like mind with DEP on the subject of irony and the deadness of its scene, I admit that if this were in fact the intention of Narrow Mind, I’d have to applaud their dedication to the vision. But, as even a cursory listen will demonstrate, what we have here is not irony but idiocy.

The music:
These guys placed fourth in their high school battle of the bands in Zurich, which maybe doesn’t sound so bad, until you learn that only five bands entered the contest, and the fifth was obviously some kind of joke staged by that one weird kid who plays the accordian. Narrow Mind are generic enough that the best label for them is probably just “heavy metal” but this especially reminds me of the absolute worst indie European power metal of the mid 90s, bands I’d encounter only as singleton tracks somehow tacked on to fill in the extra time at the end of a blank 90 minute cassette, by a trader who thought, “Well, if he’s interested in the German Avalanche, he might like this as well.” And then, of course, I’d quickly discover that I didn’t actually like Avalanche, let alone the shitty filler band. And that band, still, would have been better than Narrow Mind. Bad playing, bad singing, bad songs. Just, bad
— Friar Johnsen