Skeleton - Ordainment of Divinity Demo

Going Medieval. 

(Originally submitted to the Metal Archives on February 20th 2021)  

Texas’ Skeleton took the underground by storm last year with the release of their self-titled debut, landing in quite a few people’s top 10 lists. Their blend of black and thrash sat well with seemingly everyone but me at the time of release. Despite that though I promised myself that I’d keep an eye on the band in the future in case they developed further, seeing as they had quite a bit of potential. Last week they unexpectedly dropped the Ordainment of Divinity demo, and I obviously had to give it a listen. Did the band develop or improve compared to what we saw on the self-titled?
The answer is, not really. Following an overlong ambient intro of marching soldiers, we’re thrown into the first track, “I”. It kicks the demo off properly with some serviceable speedy riffs, and maintains that pace for most of its duration, barring that small section at 0:54. That section singlehandedly ruined the track, primarily because of the production. Now, it’s to be expected that a demo will not sound as crisp as a properly recorded release, and for the most part I’m fine with what’s on offer here. Everything has this cold, second wave black metal feel to it, and the mix is solid enough, barring the bass guitar and the tom. The damn tom is so loud and high up in the mix it clips through everything else whenever Victor Ziolkowski hits it. The aforementioned section sounds like the band just decided to throw their instruments down a staircase and then resume playing as if nothing happened.
Thankfully, the rest of the tracks fare much better, in great part due to having more room to develop and because there’s less tomfoolery going on. “II” has a lot of tempo shifts throughout, where the band decides to mix things up a little with riffs like the one at 0:59, which is underpinned by a pretty nice d-beat. “III” despite its brevity also has quite a bit of variety, as well as a cool solo at 0:39.
Lastly, we have “IV”, which is a cool song, it has plenty of good riffs and a solo, but the problem lies past the 2:17 mark. It’s yet another ambient section, this time in a battlefield with plenty of gunfire going on. While it ties up the “war throughout the ages” theme established by the more medieval “Opening Rites”, it’s still way too long and takes up nearly 2 minutes of the song’s 4 minute runtime. To put that into perspective, the entire demo barely breaks 12 minutes, 4 of which are spent with these ambient sections. They’re a cool idea that sadly has no place in an already brief demo, and only hurt it in the long run.
Ordainment of Divinity is a release that isn’t going to bring any new fans to the fold, but will most likely satisfy any preexisting fans who were in need of more Skeleton material. It certainly has some neat ideas that would make for great additions to future albums, but it didn’t do anything to change my mind on the band sadly. I still intend to keep an eye on them, even if it’s more cautious than it was in the past.
Highlights: II, III

Rating: 55% 

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