With his many bands and projects the ever restless and total workaholic MBN is presenting new music almost every week, and while, of course, not everything is equally good or essential, it is remarkable how he retains an impressively high level of quality. From all of his projects to me Chevallier Skrog is one of the most interesting, I have always felt that MBN feels most at home within the musical framework of Chevallier Skrog (and Arzhaabat). Although not all the intervening work between the last Chevallier Skrog review (‘Brethren Relegatus’ 2023) and this new demo has been featured on these pages, but I have always kept an eye on this project. With this recently released new demo ‘Dokud Nepomine Nebe I Zem’ (‘Until Heaven And Earth Pass’ translated to English), I felt it was time to take this band back to our pages.
Within the vast amount of releases with the Chevallier Skrog name on it, it is quite obvious that the band the progressing quite a lot. Not so much in the sense of a serious musical evolution, but even more so in the song crafting department. Although this demo has only one 5-minute song, it definitely feels much better thought out and overall more musically mature. Yet, without losing a bit of the band’s tried and tested formula from its previous output. It still has Raw Black Metal as its core and a flair of Punk woven throughout the majority of its riffs and rhythms, but while that might have remained mostly the same, it’s previously broad dynamics are even further extended but above all it feels more natural. A firm sense of Folk music has also crept more prominently into the music, or at least it has reached an equal level of organic character, just like the music’s trademark dynamics.
Chevallier Skrog has never been a band that was easy to capture in words and it still isn’t. Yet while it firmly retained its musical framework, the carefully orchestrated progression is putting the band on slightly safer grounds, at least in some aspects a little more recognisable to the average listener. This is not in the least due to a somewhat less gritty production, although the entire thing can still be categorised under ‘Raw Black Metal’ without a doubt, the current somewhat cleaned-up sound allows all layers of the music to stand out better.
